Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/537

Rh 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 classical 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 institutions, 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 become 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 dominated by white peoples—Anglo-Saxons, Celts, French-Canadians and others—knit together in most instances by the ties of blood relationship, but with equal if not greater closeness by common interests, an identical civilization and a love of liberty, in addition to that dignified but enthusiastic acceptance, already referred to, of the constitutional 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.

Ruled 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