of this has permanent value to the world. She has permeated its thoughts, modified its action and strengthened its character as no other race or nation ever could.
In the Norse mythology, it was the Mitgard serpent which reached around the world, swallowed its own tail and held the world together. England has been the Mitgard-Serpent of history. She has made this a British planet. Her young men have gone into all regions where freemen can live. They have built up free institutions held together by the British cement of cooperation and compromise. She has carried her Pax Britannica, the British peace, with its semblance of order and decency, to all barbarous lands, and she has mixed with it enough of freedom to give her rule permanence. She has made it possible for Englishmen to trade and to prey with savages. "What does he know of England, who only England knows?" For the activities of the Greater Britain, of which we of the republic of America form an integral part, are greater by far than those confined to the little island from which the British people set forth to inherit the earth.
What has it all cost? For such great race exertion must take some toll in race exhaustion. This loss will not appear in the decline in ability of statesmen or scholars. It means a decline in their numbers, and the relative increase in numbers of those types of men whom empire can not use.
Much of the force of England has gone out to America and to those self-governing commonwealths no longer to be called colonies, which have spread British traditions over forceful young democracies, who have escaped Britain's greatest evil, the legalization of privilege. But a man is a man, wherever he may live, and we can hardly count the occupation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as loss to the motherland.
But with India the case is not so clear. Men have asked, What has Britain done for India? We may admit that she has done much, and her work, improving with experience, grows more helpful and humane as time goes on. What has India done for Britain? This is a parallel problem little considered, and there is much harm mixed with the good which enters into the calculation. For India has enriched England—a small part of England engaged in overseas trade. The men whom India has made wealthy, men like the Sassoons of the opium trade are not, as a rule, those who share their fortunes with the people, taxed to make these fortunes possible. India has furnished employment for thousands of young Englishmen ("outdoor relief for sons of good families") and it has furnished graves for thousands of British yeomen and British gentlemen, men of spirit whom Britain could ill afford to spare.
A British officer once said to me,
I have seen men who might have been makers of empire die like flies in India.
