The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very
energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly
mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these
energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate
past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the
Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God.
There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of
death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man,
perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable
that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale,
though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community
made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the
human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With
society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and
geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with
all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is
simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the
delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the
thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush
of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the
eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot
out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the
jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli
and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits
of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link
imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more
ignominious fall.