THE SCIENCE OF DISTANCES. 529 



seem a somewhat grandiloquent method of description, it is a fairly 

 accurate statement of fact. Still more interesting to us is another truth 

 — that outside of these islands we have some ten millions of white- 

 skinned English-speaking fellow-subjects. These islands are scarcely 

 more than one-hundredth part of the whole Empire, although we count 

 as four-fifths of its white population; of the total number of the 

 Queen's subjects we are, however, no more than a tenth. 



British Empire is somewhat of a misnomer, just as the North 

 American and Australian Colonies were never colonies at all in the clas- 

 sical sense of the word. For the colonies are not independent of the 

 mother country. An empire again really means a number of subject 

 peoples brought together, and at first held together, by force. India 

 is an empire, for instance. Some new title or phrase would have to be 

 invented to describe accurately all the possessions of the British Crown 

 from the government of India through all possible grades of more or 

 less direct control until we come to some colony with representative in- 

 stitutions, and thence to the great commonwealths with responsible 

 legislators and responsible cabinets. Happily, however, there is no 

 need now for any novel designation. The style British Empire has be- 

 come in time of stress a rallying cry for all the Queen's subjects, and the 

 term has become sanctified by the noble, eager devotion shown to her 

 Majesty, both as a beloved and venerated constitutional sovereign, and 

 as the common bond of unity between those great self-governing 

 daughter-nations which we in the past were accustomed to speak of as 

 'our colonies.' Consequently British Empire has henceforward 

 a clearly defined, a distinct, a national significance, just as Imperialism 

 has a special and peculiar meaning to all of us. We understand by 

 British Empire and by British Imperialism a confederacy of many lands 

 under the rule of her Britannic Majesty. This confederacy is domi- 

 nated by white peoples — Anglo-Saxons, Celts, French-Canadians and 

 others — knit together in most instances by the ties of blood relation- 

 ship, but with equal if not greater closeness by common interests, an 

 identical civilization and a love of liberty, in addition to that digni- 

 fied but enthusiastic acceptance, already referred to, of the constitu- 

 tional sovereignty of the same Queen. We may hope that generous 

 democratic expansiveness and social assimilation will also in time detain 

 willingly within the limits of this British confederacy of white peoples 

 those other Christians and distant kinsfolk of ours in South Africa 

 who are at present so bitterly antagonistic. 



Euled and controlled under liberal ideals by the center of authority 

 there are, in addition, the great subject territories whose non-Christian 

 population are less advanced in moral and material progress. They 

 exhibit indeed every degree of backwardness, from the barbarism of the 



TOL. 1 VIII.— 34 



