hideous system which Frederick the Great began, Bismarck continued, and the Kaiser William has put to its final test.
How is it with us? It was almost worth the cost in blood and treasure of this War that we should have brought together in such bonds of love and defence and enthusiasm the far-flung States and races of our world-wide Empire. Was there ever in the history of mankind through all the ages any such vindication of an Empire and of a system as that which we have seen within the last few weeks? The Boers, arrayed in fierce battle against us but a few years ago, have rushed to our defence; the glory and the beauty of our generous, large-hearted free Empire has won them. From India the princes and the peoples, the warriors and the priests, the contented and those in revolt, have commingled their arms and their prayers for the victory of the arms of that Empire which has joined their warring races and creeds under the majestic and reconciling fabric of the Pax Britannica. Our colonies, the children of our loins and the heirs of our institutions, are rushing to our banners. Ireland, but lately a sullen and hostile sister, and divided, apparently, by unbridgeable gulfs of creed and race, has to-day but one rivalry—the rivalry as to which race and which creed will put forth the larger measure of its blood for the defence of our Empire and our ideals. Oh! you wretched Treitschkes and Nietzsches and Bernhardis, where is your gospel of war and might and slavery now, in face of these million men who are rushing to the battlefield, brought thither by the irresistible magnet of freedom in a free Empire?
These, then, seem to my mind the issues of this War. These have seemed to me the issues from the very first hour the war-cloud appeared on the horizon. The Germans demand world-wide dominion; and they demand it so that they may make the world subservient to the German race and to the Prussian system. To me that would be the end in the world of all that every free man, every sane man, and every Christian man holds dear. It would be the victory of the Empire of military despotism over the free Empire of free institutions and free men. It would be the return of a despotism which has no more relation to the life of to-day, than the rule of the savage, roaming in the primeval forest, who won his food by slaying his fellow-man. It would be the crushing out of all that intellectual, spiritual, and national side of the human soul which alone makes the world possible.
