of imperial Rome, there was in the people no satisfaction of the spirit. This exists only in the conscious energy,the freedom of the people; but in the empire there is the depression of the spirit. There is no comprehension of a moral end. The imperial government, if it acts in respect to the people, acts only in doing what is good for them, while in the nation the individual is called, in its organic and moral being, to act in the realization of that which is in itself good.

There is in the empire the creation of a love of power for its own sake, and of domination for itself. It is the view of powers and principalities. The people exist for the government, and not the government for the people. The former is not the servitor of the people, but the people is only its instrument, the means for its end. It is thus that it is only in its inception, or in certain transient intervals, that the "empire is peace," and the tendency of mere power acting itself out is to impel the people into

war.

The influence of imperialism, in the subversion of the freedom of the individual personality, tends to induce an impression of fate. The people when it acts, acts in an order which is external to it, and mechanically and blindly, as if impelled by some external power, and not in the conscious determination of men. There thus arises a sense of incapacity in the presence of the evils weighing upon it. There is the want of responsibility in respect to them, and as the people is excluded from public affairs, the decay of public conscience follows, and there is no energy nor effort toward the reform of abuses or the removal of wrongs. The government, in the destruction of the freedom of the individual person, is led to invade the sphere of the individual, and to assume the immediate conduct of life, destroying all individuality, and determining the vocation, the home, the marriage, the work and rest of men. The government also tends to become a mere system of police,

-although as in its civil system its police may be very highly organized, — since in its isolation from the people, in order that their course may not also become secret from it, it has to set spies over them, and gradually comes to regard them with suspicion and distrust. There is a tendency also to regulate life by a formal and artificial standard, to introduce some scale of virtues to denote the relative excellence of deportment, and the reward of virtue is in some ribbon or prize, and the periods of life, as of marriage, or rest from labor in age, are assigned in conformance to some uniform and external scheme of notation. It is thus in the empire that life becomes superficial and frivolous, and men are diverted with toys and playthings, as in China. Then the order of the state becomes mechanical, and this is the character of administration in China, with its competitive examinations, where political trusts and civil offices are assigned by a graduated scale in a pedantic system. It is thus also in the empire that there is the absence of all event in their history, and there is in the people an apathy, and in their long chronological records only a monotony. The tendency of imperialism has thus always been, to induce a fatalism.

The nation may exist in some transient period, through confederate or imperial forms,1 but their characteristic, if

1 In Russia there has been, with an imperial form, the advance of the people in the development of a national life and in freedom; but in its imperfect development the immediate danger to civilization is in the identification of the state, with the physical power of a race. In France, the imperial policy has been involved with constant contradictions. It established in universal suffrage the strongest guaranty of the rights of the people, and in its constitution, says Bluntschli, "full deference is given to the majesty of the people of France, as the source of the power of the state, the legislative body is made immediately dependent upon its confidence, and the imperial power derived from its will." The title of the emperor is "par la grâce de Dieu et la volenté nationale, Empereur des Francais." Its strength also has been in holding through imperial forms the conception of the nation, and its disaster has been in its later abandonment of it, as in its policy in Mexico and in its later course in Italy. In England the tendency in imperialism is more apparent. Its sympathy, Michelet says, its grosses mitgefühl," was with the confederacy. Its main alliance in this age

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the nation does not fail in its integral organic and moral power, is the lack of permanence. The nation has always to contend with them and to meet them sometimes in secret

is with the empire of the Turks, and with an historical fitness, but with no consciousness of its propriety, it received the Sultan at a banquet, at the expense of the Indian administration, and at a table covered with the plunder of Rajas' palaces. The influence of imperialism may be traced in the increase in it of Roman ecclesiasticism, and in its literature not more in the open avowal of its old men, as Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin, than in the more than pagan fatalism of its younger men. It has built an empire in India, whose policy has been to crush every germ of national spirit in its native populations; and as the national spirit in England, in the defect of moral strength, has diminished, the power in India has been held as the power in a race, and that race the English; in its Indian administration it has had no power to overcome caste, since its own government is imbedded in caste; it has degraded the people, and while under Moghul rule, the highest offices in the army and the state were open to them, all participation in the government has been denied them under English rule; it has destroyed the physical condition of national well being, in a varied industry, instead of encouraging this as a securance against famine or accident, as in Orissa it suppressed the salt manufacture, which had existed for ages, in order to swell British revenue, and in the single failure of the rice crop, there was nothing for the people to fall back on; in its constitutional formalism it established a system of civil justice, which a people, before prompt to punish crime, found so alien that they preferred to submit to crime rather than the infliction of the civil system; in its own action it found in the superstition of ignorant Sepoys its instrument, with which to send them to meet death; in its contact with a people from whom has sprung in literature the speculative hymns of the Vedas, and the delicate purity of Kalidasas verse, and the subtle metaphysical contemplation of the Maha Bahrata, and which in art has filled India with cities of architecture so imposing; it has not sought to develop the spirit of the people, but to crush and deface it. Thus under English rule, while it may conceal a real weakness, there has been an apparent increase in Hinduism, and a more lavish consumption of gold on its idols; and even Mohammedanism has increased under it, but the latter has come to discern elements of peril, only in the advance of Russia, while England's relation toward it is regarded as one of indifference. In its foreign policy it left Denmark, when every higher principle would have led it to sustain it; it might fight for the independence of Belgium, which is more integral to France than Scotland or Ireland to England, and whose independence, as R. von Mohl says, in its origin is laughable, since this is an outpost for itself on the continent; it might fight to prevent the independence of Egypt, since this is on the way to its Indian empire; opposes a vast work, of continental beneficence, as the Suez Canal, and the most effectual check to the slave trade, with secret and bitter diplomacy. The measure of reform in its suffrage may tend to check its imperialism; but its main characteristic is the incapacity to deal with the evils which it recognizes, in its suffrage, and education, and lease of land, and military organization. There seems to be no consciousness of responsibility in the people for them. The characteristic of its policy is the destitution of conscience. "In the eyes of her people," says M.

and again open alliance, and in many disguisements; it is. not on a single field, nor in a single age that the conflict is over. The close of the history of two of the great nations, in the ancient world, is the warning of the evil. The life of the nation perished,-in Greece, in the confederacy, in Rome, in the empire. The nation has always to contend with the dissolution of a confederate principal, and the domination of an imperial principal.

De Tocqueville," that which is most useful to England is always the cause of justice, and the criterion of justice is to be found in the degree of favor or opposition to English interests."

CHAPTER XIX.

THE NATION THE INTEGRAL ELEMENT IN HISTORY.

THE nation is the integral element in history. It is as old as history. The phrase which describes "the new doctrine of nationalities," has scarcely a superficial justification.

The process of history is a development in the realization of the moral order of the world. There is in it an organic unity and growth, which is the condition of its continuous life. There is the unity of the divine idea, and it holds a purpose appearing in and through and uniting the ages. It is a moral order, and thus it has been said, "the history of the world cannot be understood apart from the government of the world."

It is in history as the realization of the moral order of the world, that the nation is formed as an integral power. It is in this that the vocation of the nation is given to it, as in the fulfilling of its vocation its being as a moral person is realized. This is also implied in the realization of a moral order, since its condition is in freedom, and there can be no history in the law and sequence of a physical necessity. The nation is not then of itself a righteous power, but the realization of its being through its vocation in a moral order is in righteousness; not only the law of its being, but the condition of the realization of its being, is in righteousness. In its necessary being it moves toward this end. Thus in anarchy and oppression and violence and crime there is the negation of its being. Thus, also, in so far as it fails of its end, it passes from history. As history is in the realization of a moral order, in