It may seem premature to embark upon a discussion of the problems which will arise for the British Empire when the war is over. We are assuming, we must assume, that only one end is possible; but we are bound to recollect that this end is not yet in sight. We have for the last eighteen months been waging a successful defensive war, but we have not yet begun that successful offensive without which victory cannot be achieved. Many sacrifices and much endurance will be needed before that consummation is attained, and before we can begin to reap the results of a conflict which, as it has gone on, has revealed itself more and more to be a direct attack upon the British Empire, the most formidable to which it has ever been exposed.

Nevertheless, even in the midst of our present preoccupations, it is worth while to consider the tasks of the future. After the war, we have been told, nothing can ever be quite the same again. That is certainly true of the British Empire. It must be clear to everybody that a whole set of new problems has arisen, and that the older problems present themselves in new shape. The war has brought home to us, in a most striking and emphatic form, enlarged conceptions of the relationship between empire and military power. We have been compelled to turn our thoughts more closely to these subjects. We have all had to consider what military power signifies, what are its characteristics, its extent, its limitations.

We have seen, on the one hand, how false is the idea that empires are held together by force alone. That we know is the rooted opinion of our chief enemy; but history gives no warrant for it. It may be true of the transitory empires founded on armed conquest, like those

of Alexander the Great, Genghiz Khan, Timur, and Napoleon. But the great permanent empires have been built up by other methods. They are the result of a consensus of opinion on the part of large populations that the system which prevails is one that accords with their interests and their ideas. The three empires which for long periods held together in political union large populations, and extensive portions of the earth's surface, are conspicuous examples of this. I refer to the Empire of Rome, the Empire of Britain, and that other empire which has for a greater space of time than either maintained civilized rule among hundreds of millions of human beings-I mean the Empire of China.

Rome may have acquired her territories by war, but it was not warlike strength alone which kept the Roman State in being. One is amazed at the slenderness of the military establishment, which enabled Rome under the emperors to maintain peace and order and good government over a territory extending from the Firth of Forth to the Persian Gulf. The organized force of Rome consisted of a regular army which at no time seems to have exceeded 275,000 men, a number, it is worth noting, considerably less than the army of Greece or the army of Bulgaria. There must have been millions of Roman citizens who never, in the whole course of their life, had seen a Roman soldier; just as over a large part of India you may also find millions of people who, at any rate before the present war, had never looked upon a man in the uniform of the British Army. The provinces consented to Roman rule because it gave them good government, undisturbed order, an unequaled system of law and justice. Rome represented civilization in the highest sense in which it was then

understood. What need was there for any great display of military power to retain in contented allegiance peoples who could not imagine any change by which their general conditions could be improved?

So far from being absorbed in militarism, the Roman Empire, in its later days, was not military enough. As more and more of its citizens became habituated to a life of peaceful industry, it not only lost the barbaric taste for war, but it showed an increasing reluctance to take upon itself the burden of national defense. There was constant difficulty in obtaining sufficient recruits to keep up the strength of the legions. If Rome had had a truly national army, if all or a great part of its able-bodied citizens had been regularly trained to arms, the Huns and the Germanic tribes might have been mastered, the Roman Empire of the West might well have continued in all its vigor for another thousand years, and Europe would have been saved from many centuries of darkness and anarchy.

Turn to that other empire I have mentioned-the Empire of China. One is brought face to face with somewhat similar conclusions. China, for a period of over two thousand years, has kept in general tranquillity and well-defined civilization a quarter or a fifth of the human race. The Chinese sought no external conquests, and they relied on something entirely different from military power to maintain the union of the vast mass of kindred peoples that constituted the Kingdom. The Monarchy ruled as the representative of civilization and knowledge, and what has always seemed to its own inhabitants, at any rate a high ideal of life; and these intangible bonds held together in one polity hundreds of millions of people who yielded willing obedience to a central government which at no time had a powerful army at its disposal. But the civilized Chinaman became "too

proud to fight"; and, because of the reluctance of its inhabitants to take adequate measures for their own defense, China fell an easy prey in the seventeenth century to a Tartar tribe from the North. The conquerors were too few in number to transform the old and elaborate structure of society in which they found themselves, but the civilization of China was retarded and kept stagnant and unprogressive by the crude tryanny of the Manchu clan which had possessed itself of the government. In more recent years we have seen China threatened and assailed by many misfortunes for the same reasons. She has been the victim of aggression from Western and Eastern nations because she had lost the ability to defend herself.

There are here surely great lessons for that Empire in which we are more closely interested. The Empire of Britain has not been built up on military force. Some large portions of our territory have, no doubt, been acquired by the sword; but, even in that case, they have not been ruled and administered by the methods of conquest. The British Empire holds together for the same reason as the Roman did, because it represents to all its inhabitants an ideal of order and liberty and justice. Our adversaries had imagined that, because our free institutions and our traditions of government gave opportunities for political rivalry and for the unfettered expression at times of political discontent, therefore the subject States, as they were pleased to call them, under the British Crown, would seize the opportunity to revolt at the first touch of external danger. In numerous German publications, written before the war, it was predicted that, if ever Great Britain found herself involved in hostilities, Australia and New Zealand and Canada would hasten to declare their "independence." That cannot be called a fortunate prophecy. Nor were the charitable expectations from the same