bitants of China or East Africa, they were, as the
Social-Democrats quickly pointed out, provided with no conception of the
situation more highly developed than that which was acted upon in the
fifth century A.D., by Attila and his Huns.

[111] Speech, 1850, quoted by J.W. Headlam, _Bismarck_, p. 83.

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of
national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the
publication of Seeley's _Expansion of England_ in 1883 till the Peace of
Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a
'Blood,' an 'Island Race,' consisting of homogeneous English-speaking
individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole
population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white
inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the
other inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'--the
necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The
idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a
homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that
it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of
imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian
realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South
Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps
the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of
Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on
any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the
ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of
a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's
Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those
'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too
cosmopolitan.'[112]

[112] _Times_, Dec. 19, 1907.

But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is
now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based
not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national
variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the
Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided
from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral
chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal
acceptance of British Impe