may likely enough be unfitted for effective action. My contention is that if they are, it will be for other reasons than the nature of their ideas, and that those whose profession it is to carry ideas into practice will not be the worse, but in every way the better for possessing themselves by every means in their power of the results of the best thinking on the ends and ideals of human life.

ness.

Ethical societies aim, as I understand them, at bringing these results within the reach of busy people, so that he who runs may read. In pursuing this aim they may require to have recourse to propositions of a high degree of generality-if you like, of abstractIn this respect their teaching will be colourless and forbidding. "Philosophy," says Hegel, "paints her grey in grey," and this is not less true of ethical philosophy than of philosophy in general. But in stating its formulæ, and calling upon thinking people to understand them, ethics is not forsaking reality and losing touch with practice. On the contrary, its most recent formulæ represent the attempt to rise above the half-truths of current reflection, to embrace more of reality, and so by setting man's life in a truer perspective to give it greater significance. So far from its being a matter of indifference to practice with what ideas we approach the problems of individual and social life, it is this that makes all the difference. "Conception," says Walter Pater, "fundamental brainwork, that is what makes all the difference in art." And what is true of fine art in general is, I venture to think, equally true of that finest of all the arts, the art of life.

V.

WHAT IMPERIALISM MEANS.1

ORE than any event in the memory of the present

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generation-more than the American War of the sixties, more even than the Home Rule proposals of the eighties-the present war has come with a sword into our midst. It has searched the hearts and tried the reins not only of the great political parties of the State, but of more homogeneous groups of politicians, which we have hitherto been accustomed to think of as bound together in "solid simplicity." At first the controversy was chiefly confined to the circumstances out of which the war arose, but as it has gone on it has come more and more to turn upon the meaning and justification of the whole policy that goes by the name of Imperialism. This is as it should be. No question can be conceived which more vitally concerns the future well-being of the nation, and we might say of the world. The sooner, therefore, we can get away from the heated atmosphere of current controversy, and turn to the wider issues that have been brought to the front by it with the sincere desire to understand them, the better for us as a nation. The present article is an attempt to consider, without reference to South African politics, or party politics of any kind, two questions which everyone will admit are fundamental. First, what is the meaning of the thing we 1 Fortnightly Review, August, 1900.

call Imperialism? and second, what ought to be our attitude towards it?

In trying to find an answer to the former of these questions, the first thing that strikes us is, that Imperialism is not new, but may be said to have come into existence with our empire itself. Sir John Seeley has shown that if we would understand the meaning of English history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, we must see it in the light of the great struggle that was going on between the nations. of Europe, and especially of the great duel between England and France for the possession of the New World, and with it for a place among the great Powers of the future. The world-wide character of the wars of the period is seen in the places of their battlesArcot, the Heights of Abraham, the Nile, the Ohio. Even the Continental War that goes by the name was not really for the "Spanish Succession," but for succession to the new empire across the seas. Seeley adds, indeed, that during that period we conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. But this is only partly true. The leading men of the time were well aware of what they had done, and of its importance for the English nation. Tory politicians had their own ideas as to the way the new acquisitions should be governed, but they had no doubt at all as to their value. Even Radicals like Dr. Priestley assumed the retention of the colonies as an axiom of their political creed. But in order to understand how the wider outlook had taken possession of the higher mind of the nation in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, we must go to the speeches of the great Whig politician, Edmund Burke. It has never, I think, been sufficiently recognised (partly, perhaps,

because Burke's most popular biographer is also the biographer of Richard Cobden) that all the greatest of these speeches, that on Present Discontents, on Conciliation with America, and the whole series upon our conduct in India, were inspired by this larger outlook. Through all, Burke has his eye on the new position we occupied among the nations and the new duties it imposed. To him, at least, if to no one else, our dependencies appeared as "the first, the dearest, the most delicate objects of the internal policy of this empire."

While the Imperial sentiment is thus a creation of the eighteenth century, the form it has assumed to-day can only be understood in the light of the phases through which it has passed in the interval-the remarkable eclipse which it underwent in the early part of the present century, and the equally remarkable development that has taken place in our own time. How are we to explain these changes-enthusiasm passing into indifference, and finally into hostility, to the very idea of an empire, and then again developing into a consuming passion?

The first is comparatively easy to understand. Though the leading political authors and writers were perfectly conscious of the new destiny of England as a nation, the people at large remained absent-minded, and still thought of England as an island power, "in a great pond, a swan's nest." This view was further confirmed both by the actual distance that divided her from her colonists, and by the prevailing sentiment with which they were regarded. To Burke, as we have seen, they were the "dearest, the most delicate objects of our policy"; but to the great mass of the people of England they were dissenters and refugees

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who had forsaken home and country in quest of a liberty it had denied to them. In final confirmation of this view there came the logic of fact, "the only kind of reasoning," as Jowett used to say, "that points to the true tendencies of things "; and the separation of the American colonies seemed to set its seal to the well-known epigram of Turgot, that "colonies are like fruits that drop off when they are ripe."

But the significance of the change in the succeeding generation can only be fully understood when taken in connection with the utilitarianism, practical and philosophical, that was its leading characteristic. To the utilitarian in every period colonies have appeared in the light of "commercial assets," whose value to the mother country has consisted in the command they give her of their markets. When, therefore, it was proved by Adam Smith that the monopoly our colonies promised us was no real advantage, there seemed no longer any valid reason why we should trouble ourselves further on their behalf, and Bentham could bring the whole force of his powerful rhetoric to prove that a nation had no interest as it had no right, and indeed no power, to retain them. Let people cease to regard them with "the greedy eye of fiscality," and they would soon cease to regret the loss of them; a view which received a sort of sacramental authority for succeeding Radicals by being embalmed in James Mill's celebrated article upon Colonies, in the Encyclopædia Britannica of the time. It is true that John Stuart Mill, in the next generation, took a wider view, advocating the retention of our colonial empire as a guarantee of peace and free trade, and as likely to strengthen the moral influence in the counsels of Europe of "the power which, of all in existence, best