The British middle-class, therefore, is full of an angry, vague disposition to thwart that expansion which Germans regard very reasonably as their natural destiny; there are all the possibilities of a huge conflict in that disposition, and it is perhaps well to remember how insular—­or, at least, how European—­the essentials of this quarrel are.  We have lost our tempers, but Canada has not.  There is nothing in Germany to make Canada envious and ashamed of wasted years.  Canada has no natural quarrel with Germany, nor has India, nor South Africa, nor Australasia.  They have no reason to share our insular exasperation.  On the other hand, all these states have other special preoccupations.  New Zealand, for example, having spent half a century and more in sheep-farming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, lowering its birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventive materialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in the same interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and offspring.  Now Japan in Welt-Politik is our ally.

You see, the British Empire has no common economic interests and no natural common enemy.  It is not adapted to any form of Zollverein or any form of united aggression.  Visibly, on the map of the world it has a likeness to open hands, while the German Empire—­except for a few ill-advised and imitative colonies—­is clenched into a central European unity.

Physically, our Empire is incurably scattered, various, and divided, and it is to quite other links and forces, it seems to me, than fiscal or military unification that we who desire its continuance must look to hold it together.  There never was anything like it before.  Essentially it is an adventure of the British spirit, sanguine, discursive, and beyond comparison insubordinate, adaptable, and originating.  It has been made by odd and irregular means by trading companies, pioneers, explorers, unauthorised seamen, adventurers like Clive, eccentrics like Gordon, invalids like Rhodes.  It has been made, in spite of authority and officialdom, as no other empire was ever made.  The nominal rulers of Britain never planned it.  It happened almost in spite of them.  Their chief contribution to its history has been the loss of the United States.  It is a living thing that has arisen, not a dead thing put together.  Beneath the thin legal and administrative ties that hold it together lies the far more vital bond of a traditional free spontaneous activity.  It has a common medium of expression in the English tongue, a unity of liberal and tolerant purpose amidst its enormous variety of localised life and colour.  And it is in the development and strengthening, the enrichment the rendering more conscious and more purposeful, of that broad creative spirit of the British that the true cement and continuance of our Empire is to be found.