IX

“ROME OF THE CÆSARS gave the Unity of Civilisation that force imposed on

Europe. ROME OF THE POPES gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority

imposed on a great part of the human race. ROME OF THE PEOPLE will give,

when you Italians are nobler than you are now, a Unity of civilisation

accepted by the free consent of the nations for Humanity.” In this

magnificent synthesis, written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission

of Rome to the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than

Lazzaretti’s, whose story is one of Life’s many plagiarisms of the

Palestinian original, complete even to martyrdom and an awaited

Resurrection. Yet Mazzini shared with the peasant-prophet of Monte

Amiata the assurance of a not distant Millennium to be inaugurated by

his followers. ’Twas a blindness due to standing in his own white light.

The simplest observation of the facts reveals that humanity is only at

its alphabet, that we are living in the mere infancy of our planet’s

human history, in a Dark Age to which the millennial century will look

back with incredulity, though a few Gissings will be anxious to live in

it. The overwhelming majority of mankind to-day abides religiously in

primitive autocosms, which have little resemblance to the cosmos as it

is, and every variety of savagery from African cannibalism to European

rubber-hunting and American negro-lynching is still in vogue. Half the

land of the globe is still in undisturbed possession of our animal and

insect inferiors. Canada, Australia and South America show a few human

figures dotting the endless spaces—in Matto Grosso in Brazil a hundred

thousand people occupy half a million square miles, in Patagonia each

man may have a San Marino Republic to himself, in Alaska the population

of a small English country town is spread over six hundred thousand

square miles. Even the United States, which are sixty times as large as

England, have only double its population. In Asia, the cradle of

so-called civilisation, there are still nomad populations, and large

tracts, as of Arabia and Tibet, have never been penetrated by the foot

of an explorer. The bulk of Africa as of Russia—which is half Europe

_plus_ half Asia—is still given over to barbarism. One third of the

whole human race is packed into China, a land where torture is still

legal. Decidedly there is plenty of scope for “the mission of Rome,” nor

need the lover of the picturesque yet apprehend the monotony of the

Millennium, as, girdled by stars and infinities, crossed by the tails of

comets, rent and seamed by earthquakes, our planet continues its amazing

adventure.

X

But if spiritual Imperialism has made little progress in the land of

Mazzini, Rome does not lack its party of material Imperialism, ever

egging on Italy to deeds of derringdo and to the fulfilment of its

“manifest destiny” in Tripoli and Cyrenaica, whose arid deserts flow

with milk and honey under the imperialistic pen. More in sorrow than in

anger a writer in the _Tribuna_ rebukes these hotheads as merely

literary: conquistadors by fury of metaphor and prosopopœia, whereas

real Imperialism—Francesco Coppola perceives with envy—is the

irresistible instinct of an imperial race, whose expansion is

unconscious or even anti-conscious, and which is rich in strong silent

Kiplingesque heroes. Italy, a young nation, whose bones are not yet set,

whose teeth are not yet sprouted, is falling, he laments, into the

senile decay of socialistic rhetoric, and pacifical and humanitarian

doctrine. The degenerate Italians have pulled up the railway lines to

prevent the soldiers going off to the wars of expansion, have made a

pother about “slavery,” and have diverted the world by setting Civil and

Military Governors cock-fighting before Commissions of Inquiry. “And

then we call ourselves the heirs of Rome!”

But, prithee, good Signor Coppola, is it not enough to be the heirs of

Italy? Is it not enough to inhabit the most beautiful land in the world,

the richest-dyed in historic tints, the greatest breeder of great men,

the garden of the arts, the temple of religion? Is there no such thing

as Intensive Imperialism? To produce the highest life per square mile is

surely infinitely more Imperial than to multiply Saharas of mediocrity,

to follow Stock Exchange adventures in Abyssinia or to decimate the

dervishes of Benadir? In the village of my home there is only a single

shop, and it writes over its windows the proud legend: “To lead in every

department is our ambition.” But Italy, in open competition with the

world, achieved the hegemony of civilisation in every department. What,

beside this, is the military heirship of Rome?

And has England, the heir of Rome, so enviable a position? Far from it,

alas! That unconscious or anti-conscious instinct of hers has landed her

in the gravest situation of which consciousness was ever called upon to

take stock. Holding nearly a quarter of the globe with a white

population—outside these islands—of only ten millions; with a

heterogeneous empire of Colonies, Crown Colonies, and Possessions,

incapable of being brought under a single constitution or concept but

that of force and tending to destroy such constitutions or ethical

concepts as survive at home; with manifold subject races which she is

too proud to make freemen of the Empire as Rome did; threatened and

troubled in Europe by Germany, in Asia by India, in Africa by Egypt, in

America by the States, in Australia by the Chinese and Japanese, the

heir of Rome has seen her palmy days. The equilibrium is too unstable,

and the part that came with the sword must perish with the sword. The

Russo-Japanese war—the most important event in history since the fall

of Rome—by destroying the glamour of the white man and showing that

Christianity is not essential to success in slaughter—has shaken the

foundations of her Indian and Egyptian Empire. The old apprehension that

Russia was the menace to India is justifying itself, but it is Russia’s

weakness, not her strength, that has provided the menace. Britain’s only

future—no mean one indeed—lies in Canada, Australia and South Africa,

and even here it is impossible for her to fill these great continents or

sub-continents with the emigrating surplus of her decaying population,

especially as her emigrants prefer the United States and are often

excluded from her own Colonies. Her utmost hope is to keep these

colonies British in constitution. They cannot be British in

language—French Canada and Dutch South Africa forbid that; they cannot

even be predominantly white, for North Australia is tropical and South

Africa is not a white man’s country but a whited sepulchre—an

aristocracy exploiting the coloured labour it despises, a society poised

perilously on its apex. How unwieldy such an Empire at its best beside

the United States—one continuous area, one language, one constitution,

and but for the hereditary curse of the negro problem, one free and

equal brotherhood! But how cumbrous even the United States, only kept

from breaking into separate States with separate dialects by the modern

network of railways, telegraphs and newspapers! How much more favourable

to intensive and exalted living, a compact little country like Italy,

rich in all the essentials of greatness and happiness!

There was the epic sweep of a statesman in Chamberlain’s vision of a

true British Empire of federated freemen, but even with him Ireland was

incongruously excluded, and the first fine prophetic rapture has chilled

into commercialism under the British incapacity for imaginative

synthesis. What was originally a consummation _devoutly_ to be desired,

and to be achieved only by sacrifice, is now presented as a policy that

will pay, and even pay immediately. In the same breath we have an heroic

trumpet-call and an estimate of the profits. It would, indeed, be

strange if the good coincided so closely with the lucrative. But that is

the trickery of all forms of Protectionist teaching, to dazzle with two

alternative advantages simultaneously. Matilda is the heiress and Madge

is beautiful—who would remain a bachelor when wealth and beauty are to

be had for the asking?

Meantime the British Empire—so envied of the Italian Imperialist—is

fast being conquered by Germany. For what is the mere absence of the

German flag from our shores to our Germanisation in ideas, our

transformation to German notions of conscription, our permeation by the

doctrine of blood and iron? Already a pamphleteer calls for Lord

Kitchener to “take away that bauble.” Whether the new German province

which is replacing the old land of freedom continues to be called

British or not, is a secondary matter. The formal consummation of the

conquest would even relieve England of nightmares of unmanly terror and

mountains of taxation. I like to think that it was this German province,

and not the England of Edward VII which, ensuing Peace before Honour,

made a compact with the Power of Darkness and put back the clock of

Europe. It could not surely be the old Colossus of Freedom, whose untold

millions fertilise every soil on earth and whose ships outnumber

overwhelmingly the united vessels of the world—it could not surely be

“the England of our dreams” which grasped the hand of Russia and sent

Finland and Persia to their dooms, and now trembles to stir a finger for

any cause, however forlorn, and any ideal, however British.

Let the nation of Mazzini take heed before it loses its own soul to gain

the world.