Page:The empire and the century.djvu/406

 By W. PETERSON

the record of the 'Deeds that won the Empire' may now be considered closed, Britain has still a great work in front of her—the work of Imperial organization, consolidation, and, if possible, federation. To ridicule this aspiration, and to pronounce it unrealizable, on the ground that the achievement would be altogether without historic parallel, is a cheap and easy form of selfishness. It betrays the limitation of outlook, the want of imagination, which is one of the main defects, for all its sturdiness, of the Anglo-Saxon character. No doubt there are difficulties to be surmounted, and adverse conditions to be overcome. It may be true that the Empire, as we know it to-day, is 'anomalous' and 'amorphous.' But there are many of us— not unfamiliar with the records of the past, or the circumstances of the present time—who feel confident that, if it were possible to forecast the judgment of history, it would be found to be against a policy of drift, or 'let well alone.'

In the mission of further consolidation we start with one great point in our favour. It is by no means to its disadvantage or discredit that the British Empire is not altogether as other Empires have been. It was by the sword that old Rome, for instance, held what by the sword she had won. To her modern successor and representative has been left the glory of reconciling the 363