WAR SELECTION IN WESTERN EUROPE 153 



of this has permanent value to the world. She has permeated its 

 thoughts, modified its action and strengthened its character as no other 

 race or nation ever could. 



In the Norse mythology, it was the Mitgard serpent which reached 

 around the world, swallowed its own tail and held the world together. 

 England has been the Mitgard-Serpent of history She has made this 

 a British planet. Her young men have gone into all regions where 

 freemen can live. They have built up free institutions held together 

 by the British cement of cooperation and compromise. She has carried 

 her Pax Britannica, the British peace, with its semblance of order and 

 decency, to all barbarous lands, and she has mixed with it enough of 

 freedom to give her rule permanence. She has made it possible for 

 Englishmen to trade and to prey with savages. "What does he know 

 of England, who only England knows?" For the activities of the 

 Greater Britain, of which we of the republic of America form an in- 

 tegral part, are greater by far than those confined to the little island 

 from which the British people set forth to inherit the earth. 



What has it all cost? Eor such great race exertion must take 

 some toll in race exhaustion. This loss will not appear in the decline 

 in ability of statesmen or scholars. It means a decline in their num- 

 bers, and the relative increase in numbers of those types of men whom 

 empire can not use. 



Much of the force of England has gone out to America and to 

 those self-governing commonwealths no longer to be called colonies, 

 which have spread British traditions over forceful young democracies, 

 who have escaped Britain's greatest evil, the legalization of privilege. 

 But a man is a man, wherever he may live, and we can hardly count 

 the occupation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as 

 loss to the motherland. 



But with India the case is not so clear. Men have asked, What 

 has Britain done for India? We may admit that she has done much, 

 and her work, improving with experience, grows more helpful and 

 humane as time goes on. What has India done for Britain? This is 

 a parallel problem little considered, and there is much harm mixed with 

 the good which enters into the calculation. For India has enriched 

 England — a small part of England engaged in overseas trade. The 

 men whom India has made wealthy, men like the Sassoons of the opium 

 trade are not, as a rule, those who share their fortunes with the 

 people, taxed to make these fortunes possible. India has furnished em- 

 ployment for thousands of young Englishmen (" outdoor relief for sons 

 of good families") and it has furnished graves for thousands of British 

 yeomen and British gentlemen, men of spirit whom Britain could ill 

 afford to spare. 



A British officer once said to me, 

 I have seen men who might have been makers of empire die like flies in India. 



VOL. LXXXVII. — 11. 



