5U 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



in her hands. Bismarck is wise enough, he is 

 sufficiently conscious of the conditions of real 

 strength, and sufficiently in accord with the 

 spirit of his age himself, to abstain from distant 

 acquisitions ; but we need fear no moral protests 

 on his part. 



And so with regard to the Empire of India, 

 which is the thing mainly in question all the 

 time, and for the sake of which, principally, 

 these further acquisitions are proposed. Once 

 acquired it must be kept ; mere anarchy would 

 be the consequence of our withdrawal from it ; 

 and its acquisition commenced in a period which, 

 though not so very remote, was yet anterior, if 

 not to international morality, certainly to the in- 

 clusion within the pale of international morality 

 of those who were not within the pale of Christen- 

 dom. No government in Europe at that time 

 would have shrunk from taking the territory of 

 the pagans of Hindostan any more than they 

 shrank from enslaving the pagans of Africa. 

 France, since our censor, was at that time our 

 competitor, and she herself took Algeria at a 

 later day, when the light of a higher morality 

 had at least dawned upon the civilized world. 



With the question of morality, we repeat, we 

 have here nothiug to do ; but to the question of 

 expediency also it must be admitted that there 

 are two sides. The decay of empires is the theme 

 of history. They decay because they are sustained 

 not by the moral forces which sustain national 

 happiness, and the nature of which is to increase 

 in strength, but by physical force, the nature of 

 which is to decline, if not positively yet (what 

 comes to the same thing) relatively to the forces 

 around it. There is no reason why British vir- 

 tue, energy, and industry, should not continue as 

 they are, or increase with the lapse of time ; and, 

 therefore, there is no reason why the New-Zea- 

 lander should ever moralize over the ruins of the 

 British nation ; but the man of the future, who- 

 ever he may be, is pretty sure one day to moral- 

 ize over the ruins of the British Empire. We 

 ourselves moralize over the ruined empire of 

 Spain, and see clearly enough that the vast and 

 scattered dependencies which were her pride, and 

 which she imagined to be the sources of her 

 strength, were really draining away her life-blood. 

 We moralize over the effects of the error com- 

 mitted by Venice in leaving the true path, the 

 path of commercial enterprise, to indulge a terri- 

 torial ambition which led to the corruption of 

 her government and, by the umbrage it gave to 

 other powers, brought on her the League of Cam- 

 bray. Yet we may be sure that every Spaniard 



and every Venetian, in the days of Spanish and 

 Venetian empire, would have felt himself bound 

 by loyalty and patriotism to uphold aggrandize- 

 ment and to denounce counsels of moderation as 

 a betrayal of the honor and greatness of the 

 country. 



Palmerston's Civis Romanus is one of many 

 indications that the image of the Eoman Empire 

 still vaguely hovers before our minds. The 

 Roman Empire belonged to an age before Hu- 

 manity, to an age in which morality was in the 

 germ, to an age in which force was the only law 

 and the only principle of organization. Coming 

 when it did, it formed a sort of matrix for 

 modern civilization, and thus served a purpose 

 which conquest can never serve again. By unit- 

 ing all the nations round the Mediterranean under 

 a common yoke it repressed war, the great 

 primeval obstacle to the progress of humanity, 

 and rendered possible the diffusion of ideas, be- 

 sides breaking down generally the barriers of 

 tribal isolation. An attempt to reproduce it, or 

 anything like it, in these days would be an anach- 

 ronism of the most flagrant kind. It sstability 

 depended upon the absence of any rival power, 

 when once the conquest of the Mediterranean na- 

 tions had been accomplished ; and, in this respect 

 also, an imitation of it in a world divided among 

 a number of great powers would be not so much 

 unseasonable as insane. 



It is worthy of remark, too, that the more 

 advanced civilization even of Rome herself was 

 less prone, if not actually opposed, to conquest. 

 In the golden age of the empire, which com- 

 menced with the accession of Nerva, though there 

 were frontier wars, and some extensions of terri- 

 tory, as a consequence of those wars, the spirit 

 of improvement decidedly predominated over 

 that of aggrandizement, and the Antonines, if 

 they were alive now, would probably be " pseudo- 

 philanthropists" and "patriots of every country 

 but their own." 



The idea of Roman conquest in the nineteenth 

 century is equal in irrationality as well as cog- 

 nate to that extreme theory of hero-worship 

 which, totally ignoring historic progress, proposes 

 to regenerate modern society by poundmg it 

 with the primeval sledge-hammer of Thor. The 

 world changes, and the methods proposed by the 

 worshipers of force for organizing what they 

 imagine, in spite of their daily experience, to be 

 an anarchy, would be the most brutal of all 

 anarchies themselves. 



At all events, there can be no harm in asking 

 the advocates of a policy of aggrandizement clear- 



