Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/538

530 savagest tribesman to the intellectual but archaic civilization of ancient Asiatic nationalities.

Concerning the British Empire, and comparing it with other empires, ancient, recent or now existing, its two most remarkable features are its prodigious and long-continued growth and the persistency of its power. It cannot to all seeming grow much larger, from lack of expansive possibility. But it is unprofitable to predict. Every step which has been taken in the way of extension, particularly of late years, has been against the wishes, and in almost passionate opposition to the views of large sections of the people. Yet the process of enlargement has gone on continually, being often in actual despite of a Government, whose members find themselves powerless to prevent absorptions and concretions which they would gladly avoid. Objections to this perpetual growth of empire in territory, and to the resulting responsibility which we not altogether willingly accept, are unanswerable theoretically. The too heavy and continually increasing strain upon our military resources every one can appreciate. The limit in power of the strongest navy in the world is at least as obvious as the vital necessity that our Navy be largely and ungrudgingly strengthened. Naturally the cry of cautious, patriotic men is the same now that it has always been—'Consolidate before you step farther.' In India, owing to conscientious and strenuous opposition to every suggestion of expansion, and to the almost violent form which that opposition often took, our progress has been on the whole slow and comparatively safe. "We have (I, of course, avoid all allusion to very recent policy) as a rule consolidated, strengthened ourselves, and made our ground sure before another advance. But there is a general impression that in other parts of the world we have been hastily and unfortunately acquisitive, whether we could help it or not: that the new provinces, districts and protectorates are some of them weak to fluidity; that the great and unprecedented growth of the Empire has led to a stretching acid thinning of its holding links which are overstrained by the weight of unwieldy extension and far beyond the help of a protecting hand. I hope to be able to show that in some important respects this suspicion is not altogether true; that science, human ingenuity and racial energy have given us some compensations, and that it is not paradoxical nor incorrect to say that our recent enormous growth of empire has been everywhere accompanied by a remarkable shrinkage of distances—by quicker and closer intercommunication of all its parts one with another and with the heart center. In short, the British Empire, in spite of its seemingly reckless outspread, its sometimes cloudy boundaries, its almost vague and apparently meaningless growth, is at the present day more braced together, more manageable, and more vigorous as a complete organization than it was sixty years ago. The difference between its actual extent in the last year of the