that, I confess to a sinking of the heart. Can we blame Germany for
struggling at all costs to enlarge her borders, when _that_ is what the
British Empire means?

Until we rise, as a nation, to a conception of what we mean by our
national life, finer and grander than a mere counting of trade-returns,
what can we expect save failure and ill-success?

Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting for a worthy object (the
ending of militarism), and in the determination (if sincerely carried
out) of once more playing her part in the world as the protector of
small nations, Britain may find her salvation, and a cause which will
save her soul. It is certainly encouraging to find that there is a
growing feeling in favour of the recognition and rehabilitation of the
small peoples of the world. If it is true that Britain by her grasping
Imperial Commercialism in the past (and let us hope that period _is_
past) has roused jealousy and hatred among the other nations, equally is
it true that Germany to-day, by her dreams of world-conquest, has been
rousing hatred and fear. But the day has gone by of world-empires
founded on the lust of conquest, whether that conquest be military or
commercial. The modern peoples surely are growing out of dreams so
childish as that. The world-empire of Goethe and Beethoven is even now
far more extensive, far more powerful, than that which Wilhelm II and
his Junkers are seeking to encompass. There is something common,
unworthy, in the effort of domination; and while the Great Powers have
thus vulgarized themselves, it is the little countries who have gone
forward in the path of progress. "In modern Europe what do we not owe to
little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom six hundred years ago,
and keeping it alight through all the centuries when despotic monarchies
held the rest of the European Continent? And what to free Holland, with