practice adopted step by step for convenience, and adapted to the changing mood of circumstance; and the fundamentals of our constitutions are not their laws, but their customs. It is not by formal federation that the British realms will gather the fruits of their common sacrifice, or express the common aims to which the war has added impulse. The "councils" of the Empire will continue to resemble those mediaval English"counsels " rather than the formal bodies into which they have been converted in imagination by mistranslation of the ambiguous Latin concilia of the chroniclers. The imperial conference may develop into the imperial cabinet; but it will not become a federal council, and like its prototypes throughout the Empire it will remain unknown to the statute law of the British realms. It will become a custom of the constitution long before it becomes an Act of Parliament.

The material, and still more the moral, value of the assistance rendered by his junior partners to John Bull constitutes, however, an increase of their stake in the joint concern, and involves a corresponding increase of weight in the counsels of the Empire and the world. This consideration will affect some of the details in the settlement. Australia will certainly not be content to relinquish the German colonies in the Pacific conquered by the arms of the Commonwealth, nor South Africa those subdued by the Union. From her own particular point of view Great Britain might have preferred an indemnity to any extension of territory; but regard for the peace of her partners will probably compel her to shoulder the financial burden of the war without relief from the compensation which Germany will have to pay for her sins

against Belgium and civilization. But these gains in the Pacific and in Africa will be trifling compared with the fruits of earlier victories and the colossal sacrifice of men and treasure in this war. Australia and New Zealand will have nothing material to show for the thousands of gallant lives they have lost at the Dardanelles, and Canada will have no territorial recompense for her splendid sacrifice in Flanders. If there are to be material gains in the reduction of armaments, the destruction of militarism, and the promised reign of peace, the British realms will share them on no more than equal terms with the rest of the world.

War might have paid a victorious Germany; it will not pay a triumphant British Empire, and we are content that it should not. It was not for profit that the British realms interposed. In a sense we had, in a sense we had not counted the cost which Herr Bethmann Hollweg thought would deter us. In either case the cost was not the material point. The British realms stood in August, 1914, where Luther stood at the Diet of Worms-they could do no other than they did. They could not afford to fall short of the standard set by Belgium and her heroic King, and ignobly ignore his appeal against might. Nor, in the face of that example, are they anxious to boast of their virtue; compared with Belgium's temptation to peace and her sacrifice for the sake of her honour, their own temptations and sufferings have been slight. "Above all the nations stands humanity" is a famous legend in a great American university; and the merit of the British realms consists merely in this: they set enough store on humanity to strike a blow in its defence, and in its cause they were not too proud to fight.

VI.

BRITISH IDEALISM AND ITS COST

IN WAR.1

THERE are British disciples of Prussian Realpolitik who are only happy in the conviction that their country has been actuated by no motive higher than that of mere self-interest; and some have worked themselves into what seems to them a state of virtuous indignation over the hypocrisy of pretending that we entered the war to vindicate Belgian neutrality or the liberties of little nations, or indeed for any other purpose than that of self-defence. If we make war, it is for strictly practical reasons, and if we keep at peace, it is because peace is the first of British interests. To make war for the sake of an idea or an abstract principle would be treason to British common sense, and a betrayal of that aptitude for business upon which the British people likes to pride itself. We were not really annoyed when Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers; we should have been much more annoyed if he had called us a nation of idealists and if we had thought there was any truth in the charge. There is nothing, in fact, about which John Bull is more shamefaced than his idealism. He will confess to doggedness, courage, good-humoured tolerance, and even

1 "The Times" Literary Supplement, 18 January, 1916.

generosity; but he would rather write himself down an ass than admit that he has ideals. He feels that idealism would turn his bluff red countenance into a grimace.

So we tell one another that in fighting this war we are merely practising the noble art of self-defence, and our nearest approach to rhapsody is to talk of hearth and home. Yet the defence of self and home is a totally inadequate explanation of the part which the British realms are playing in this war, or of the motives which lead them to play it. The Briton, for one thing, has assumed that his self includes every subject of the King and that his home extends to the uttermost bounds of the British Empire, an expansion of home and self that required a certain amount of idealism and imagination. John Wesley took the whole world for his parish, John Bull has taken the whole Empire for his home. In the early days of the national service movement it was based on the need of a citizen army to protect these shores from invasion in case the first naval line of defence broke down; and the Territorial Force was sharply differentiated from the Regular Army with the same idea. The course of the war so far has justified all that was said by the Blue Water school, and yet we are raising our fourth million men, while the original distinction between the Territorial and Expeditionary Forces has practically been obliterated. Commissions in the Territorial Force are being restricted to officers volunteering for foreign service, and Territorial regiments have covered themselves with glory in France and Flanders, and are guarding Egypt and India. The British idea of home has infected the Dominions as well. Canadians

have fought with heroism on the Western Front, and Australians and New Zealanders have stamped their initials so indelibly on the Gallipoli Peninsula that most people imagine Anzac to be a Turkish name for a place in the Dardanelles. Yet Canadian and Australian homes were amply protected without this selfdefence in Flanders and the Ægean; both the British Navy and the Monroe Doctrine barred the path of German invasion across the Atlantic, and a German conquest of Australia was not among the Kaiser's dreams. He would have been glad enough to recognize--and respect the neutrality of any British realm that cared to proclaim it. Not one took advantage of the opportunity, for "home" and "self" had been expanded and exalted beyond and above the literal confines of egotism and locality; and in the expansion of the "ego "there lies the making of the ideal, whether it be an empire or the world.

For even the British Empire has not afforded a scope wide enough for the practical idealism of the British realms. We talk less of humanity than do the Americans; but American humanity confines itself, so far as effective State action is concerned, to the American Continent, and a writer in the current number of the "Yale Review" asserts that "the United States will never be justified in going to war with another well-organized and civilized nation except for defence". British humanity is not limited to a single continent, but embraces all; and Britons would not care to restrict their championship of little peoples to defending them against attack from foes who were not "well organized". It has been the excellent organization of the aggressor that produced the dis