conquest or on
religious fraud may wholly lose its hostile function. It may become the
nucleus of a national organisation expressing justly enough the people's
requirements. Such a representative character is harder to attain when
the government is foreign, for diversity in race language and local ties
makes the ruler less apt involuntarily to represent his subjects; his
measures must subserve their interests intentionally, out of sympathy,
policy, and a sense of duty, virtues which are seldom efficacious for
any continuous period. A native government, even if based on initial
outrage, can more easily drift into excellence; for when a great man
mounts the throne he has only to read his own soul and follow his
instinctive ambitions in order to make himself the leader and spokesman
of his nation. An Alexander, an Alfred, a Peter the Great, are examples
of persons who with varying degrees of virtue were representative
rulers: their policy, however irrationally inspired, happened to serve
their subjects and the world. Besides, a native government is less
easily absolute. Many influences control the ruler in his aims and
habits, such as religion, custom, and the very language he speaks, by
which praise and blame are assigned automatically to the objects loved
or hated by the people. He cannot, unless he be an intentional monster,
oppose himself wholly to the common soul.

[Sidenote: Occasional advantage of being conquered.]

For this very reason, however, native governments are little fitted to
redeem or transform a people, and all great upheavals and regenerations
have been brought about by conquest, by the substitution of one race and
spirit for another in the counsels of the world. What the Orient owes to
Greece, the Occident to Rome, India to England, native America to Spain,
is a civilisation incomparably better than that which the conquered
people could ever have provided for themselves. Conquest is a good means
of recasting those ideals, perhaps impracticable and ignorant, which a
native government at its best would try to preserve. Such inapt ideals,
it is true, would doubtless remodel themselves if they could be partly
realised. Progress from within is possible, otherwise no progress would
be possible for humanity at large. But conquest gives at once a freer
field to those types of polity which, since they go with strength,
presumably represent the better adjustment to natural conditions, and
therefore the better i