Chosen Peoples

warning that he was not a hypocrite. Does not Marvell, lamenting his death, record in words curiously like Bismarck's that his deceased hero

The soldier taught that inward mail to wear

And fearing God, how they should nothing fear?

The fact is that great and masterful souls identify themselves with the universe. And so do great and masterful nations. It is a dangerous tendency.

At the death of Queen Anne England stood at the top of the nations. But it was a greatness tainted by the slave-trade abroad, and poverty, ignorance, and gin-drinking at home. We recapture the atmosphere of 'Rule, Britannia' when we recall that Thomson wrote it to the peals of the joy-bells and the flare of the bonfires by which the mob celebrated its forcing Walpole into a war to safeguard British trade in the Spanish main. Seeley claims, indeed, that the growth of the Empire was always sub-conscious or semi-conscious at its best. This is not wholly true, for in 'The Masque of Alfred' in which 'Rule, Britannia' is enshrined, Thomson displays as keen and exact a sense of the lines of England's destiny as Seeley acquired by painful historic excogitation. For after a vision which irresistibly recalls the grosser Hebrew prophecies:

I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world:

All nations serve thee; every foreign flood,

Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames,

he points to the virgin shores 'beyond the vast Atlantic surge' and cries:

This new world,

Shook to its centre, trembles at her name:

And there her sons, with aim exalted, sow

The seeds of rising empire, arts, and arms.

Britons, proceed, the subject deep command,

Awe with your navies every hostile land.

Vain are their threats, their armies all are vain:

They rule the balanced world who rule the main.

But you have only to remember that Seeley's famous book was written expressly to persuade the England of 1883 not to give up India and the Colonies, to see how little 'Rule, Britannia' expressed the truer soul of Britain. The purification of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People. The mission which in Thomson is purely self-centred becomes in Kipling almost as universal as the visions of the Hebrew bards.

The Lord our God Most High,

He hath made the deep as dry,

He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.

But it is only as the instrument of His purpose, and that purpose is characteristically practical.

Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience;

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,

Make ye sure to each his own,

That he reap where he hath sown;

By the peace among our peoples let men know we serve the Lord.

And it is a true picture of British activities. Even thus has England on the whole ruled the territories into which adventure or economic motives drew her. The very Ambassador from Germany, Prince Lichnowsky, agrees with Rhodes that the salvation of mankind lies in British imperialism. But note how the less spiritual factors are ignored, how the prophet presents his people as a nation of pioneer martyrs, how the mission, finally become conscious of itself, gilds with backward rays the whole path of national advance, as the trail of light from the stern of a vessel gives the illusion that it has come by a shining road. Missions are not discovered till they are already in action. Not unlike those archers of whom the Talmud wittily says, they first shoot the arrow and then fix the target, nations ascribe to themselves purposes of which they were originally unconscious. First comes the tingling consciousness of achievement and power, then a glamour of retrospective legend to explain and justify it. Thus it is that that great struggle for sea-power to which Spain, Portugal, Holland, England, and France all contributed maritime genius and boundless courage, becomes transformed under the half-accidental success of one nation into an almost religious epic of a destined wave-ruler. There could not be a finer British spirit than Mr. Chesterton's fallen friend, the poet Vernède, yet even he writes:-

God grant to us the old Armada weather.

Thomson was not poet enough-nor the eighteenth century naïve enough-to create a legend in sober earnest. But the fact that he throws 'Rule, Britannia' eight centuries back to the time of Alfred the Great, before whom this glorious pageant of his country's future is prophetically unrolled, serves to illustrate the retrospective habit of national missions.

The history of England is brief, and the mission evolved in her seven centuries has not yet finally shaped itself, is indeed now shaping itself afresh in the furnace of war. Her poets have not always troubled with the soul of her. They have often, as Courthope complained of Keats, turned away from her destinies to

Magic casements opening on the foam

Of faëry lands in perilous seas forlorn.

But Israel had abundant time to perfect her conception of herself. From Moses to Ezra was over a thousand years, and the roots of the race are placed still earlier. Can we doubt it was by a process analogous to that we see at work in England, that Israel evolved into a People chosen for world-service? The Covenant of Israel was inscribed slowly in the Jewish heart: it had no more existence elsewhere than the New Covenant which Jeremiah announced the Lord would write there, no more objective reality than the Charter which Britain received when 'first at Heaven's command' she 'rose from out the azure main,' or than that Contrat Social by which Rousseau expressed the rights of the individual in society. But to say this is not to make the mission false. Ibsen might label these vitalizing impulses 'Life-illusions,' but the criteria of objective truth do not apply to volitional verities. National missions become false only when nations are false to them. Nor does the gradualness of their evolution rob them of their mystery. Hamlet is not less inspired because Shakespeare began as a writer of pothooks and hangers.

If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal tendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:-

O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat æther.

The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II, assured the monarch:-

Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!

Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,

More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.

The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be 'in pursuance of a great policy co- extensive with the Heavens and the Earth.'

VI

Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that 'Germanism is Judaism,' we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather with Japan than with Judæa. For in Japan, too, beneath all the romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the mediæval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of