But we may easily censure the diplomacy of the Imperialist age too ...

But we may easily censure the diplomacy of the Imperialist age too harshly if we forget in what Titanic chaos it was involved. A still increasing population supported increasingly on foreign food; an industrial and advertisement lead that was steadily lessening; the longest of frontiers guarded by the smallest of armies; communications encircling the world, but threaded on coaling stations that a venturesome squadron might annihilate in an afternoon; Australians snarling at the German flag in the Pacific; Newfoundland threatening to join the United States; English and Dutch eyeing one another for the mastery of South Africa; West Africa undelimited; China collapsing; Russia in search of an open sea; markets closing or opening as new tariffs are set up or spheres of influence staked out: what policy, one may ask, was possible in such a world, except the seeming no-policy of maintaining the frail Concert of Europe, of easing all

contacts, with Germany

in Africa, with France on

the Mekong; and making the

Fleet invincible at all

costs? Isolation, splendid or

not, was forced on the England of Rosebery and Salisbury as it had been chosen by the England of Canning and Palmerston, and isolation in that tense encroaching time bred a temper by turns self-critical and arrogant, reckless and earnest, and a diplomacy which the foreigner might read as a stony and unscrupulous egoism, or a flurried search for friends in a universally hostile world.

Yet all through this turmoil we hear the insistent note of a growing Imperial unity under the Crown.

What formal bonds still linked England to the Colonies were rapidly parting, and there were none to link them to each other.

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