426 SECTIONAL COMMUNICATIONS. 



as a protest against implied racial inferiority, as an assertion of racial 

 self-respect. Unless we can find some means of handling them in that 

 sense, I apprehend that the result will be increasing embarrassment in 

 our task of Imperial unity. It will certainly be a growing lack of 

 spontaneity on the part of the claimants in their response to future 

 Imperial calls upon them. 



An earlier and a nobler Eoman than Caracalla had envisaged a 

 similar problem. When Julius Caesar turned his marvellous genius to 

 the construction of Imperial Eome, to the conversion of the City State 

 into a Mediterranean Empire, he laid his plans on wider and more 

 generous lines than were revealed to any of his successors. His policy, 

 as interpreted by Mommsen, was to secure ' unity in those institutions 

 which express the general life of nations — in constitution and adminis- 

 tration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures and weights.' 

 After a lapse of 2,000 years it would not be easy to improve on this 

 catalogue of the essentials of Imperial unity. Some of the items are 

 not of the same importance as in the ancient world ; diversity of weights 

 and measures has been rendered innocuous by commercial ingenuity, 

 and diversity of monetary standards has yielded to the agreeable subtle- 

 ties of exchange. But unity of constitution and administration, of 

 religion and jurisprudence, remains the ideal foundation for a common 

 citizenship. Eeligion, indeed, though some of us are old-fashioned 

 enough to consider it the most important of the four, must for our 

 present purposes be left out of the picture. The official adoption of a 

 new faith presented little difficulty to the world of Julius Caesar's 

 day, and the Eoman pantheon was often opened, by way of settling 

 theological controversies, to the adoption of gods from another creed. 

 Eeligious compromise is not so easy in our days ; but in place of absorp- 

 tion we have learned tolerance, and the forcible conversion of subject 

 races has gone out of fashion. In laying out the lines of Imperial 

 Citizenship, therefore, we must assume that Christianity will work 

 independently of the State. We must also aim at a scheme of civic 

 duties which can be fulfilled and civic rights which can be exercised 

 without prejudice to, and without being prejudiced by, the religious 

 practices of the individual citizen. 



May we take it, then, that the qualifications for full Imperial Citizen- 

 ship are (1) the attainment of a similar type of constitution, (2) sub- 

 mission to a uniform system of administration, and (3) the acceptance 

 of a common code of jurisprudence? I think it will be found that these 

 underlie and support the whole sphere of civic rights and duties which 

 we have in oiu" mind. For b}' a common jurisprudence we mean not 

 only obedience to the same set of laws, but a ready support to the 

 authority which enforces them ; we mean equality of all men before the 

 laws, and equal justice in their execution; and we mean a standard 

 of commercial and public morality which the spirit of the law inculcates, 

 though its letter cannot always impose it. Similarly, by a uniform 

 system of administration we imply the acceptance of such regulation 

 of the incidents of everyday life as the general sense of the community 

 demands, particularly in regard to education, industry, sanitation, and 

 public health. And by unity of constitution I conceive that we should 



