Page:The empire and the century.djvu/52

 populous Empire in India, islands in every sea, territory on every continent; among its subjects representatives of every race on the face of the earth, and in its political institutions, in the relations between Government and governed, nearly every mode known to man. This variety alone gives it an unrivalled breadth and spaciousness, and makes it the truly representative State of the modern world, a very microcosm of the world at large.

At the centre, to pursue our examination, we have the nation to whose political genius the Empire owes its existence—a nation renowned, apart from its other achievements, as the parent of free government wherever it exists, and as having carried it in her own case to perhaps its highest pitch of perfection. Yet at the very opposite pole of political development we have in India despotism organized by this same nation with an amplitude and, on the whole, an excellence such as the world has hardly seen before, and providing a shelter from anarchy for hundreds of millions of human beings to whom self-government would be an unthinkable absurdity. Then we have the two great self-governing federations of Canada and Australia, nation States second in possibilities of growth to the United States alone. In the same category there is New Zealand, the island counterpart in the Southern Seas of Britain in the North Atlantic. In another category there is South Africa, the middle term between Canada and India, perplexed by divisions between her two white races, who will one day unite to form a new nationality, and all the sooner because they are only a governing caste surrounded by millions of coloured dependents. Lastly, there are the Crown Colonies, Protectorates, and spheres of influence in every continent, containing the raw materials of many Indias and many Canadas, great and small, and perhaps still more of many South Africas of every intermediate shade between those two extremes.

Now, the most notable fact in this enumeration is the presence, in addition to the parent nation at the centre