PREFACE.

Ww}

Men are misled by the analogy of other
Empires, ancient and modern. They will
not or cannot realise that the British Empire
is and must necessarily always be unlike
these. The true ideal is and should be a
vast co-operative league of contented and
emulous Anglo-Saxon States, together with
an Empire in the East of different races and
different conditions. When that truth is
grasped we shall have less of the perilous
rhetoric as to the necessity either of mechanically
 drawing closer or of drifting apart—
less of the specious fallacy that if there be
Not a constant centripetal movement in the
Empire there will be a constant centrifugal
movement.

You might as well say that if the
pillars of a Doric temple be not constantly
pulled together they will fall outwards and
ruin the building. It is on the solidity, consistency,
 and substance of the component
parts that the Empire rests, not on the
doomed effort to assimilate fiscal conditions
all over the world.

ROSEBERY.