Note (return) — Chapter IV

The modern English imperialists tried for some time to apply the idea of national homogeneity to the facts of the British Empire. From the publication of Seeley's Expansion of England in 1883 till the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 they strove to believe in the existence of a 'Blood,' an 'Island Race,' consisting of homogeneous English-speaking individuals, among whom were to be reckoned not only the whole population of the United Kingdom, but all the reasonably white inhabitants of our colonies and dependencies; while they thought of the other inhabitants of the Empire as 'the white man's burden'—the necessary material for the exercise of the white man's virtues. The idealists among them, when they were forced to realise that such a homogeneity of the whites did not yet exist, persuaded themselves that it would come peacefully and inevitably as a result of the reading of imperial poems and the summoning of an imperial council. The Bismarckian realists among them believed that it would be brought about, in South Africa and elsewhere, by 'blood and iron.' Lord Milner, who is perhaps the most loyal adherent of the Bismarckian tradition to be found out of Germany, contended even at Vereeniging against peace with the Boers on any terms except such an unconditional surrender as would involve the ultimate Anglicisation of the South African colonies. He still dreams of a British Empire whose egoism shall be as complete as that of Bismarck's Prussia, and warns us in 1907, in the style of 1887, against those 'ideas of our youth' which were 'at once too insular and too cosmopolitan.'[112]