But in the minds of most of our present imperialists, imperial egoism is now deprived of its only possible psychological basis. It is to be based not upon national homogeneity but upon the consciousness of national variation. The French in Canada are to remain intensely French, and the Dutch in South Africa intensely Dutch; though both are to be divided from the world outside the British Empire by an unbridgeable moral chasm. To imperialism so conceived facts lend no support. The loyal acceptance of British Imperial citizenship by Sir Wilfred Laurier or General Botha constitutes something more subtle, something, to adapt Lord Milner's phrase, less insular but more cosmopolitan than imperial egoism. It does not, for instance, involve an absolute indifference to the question whether France or Holland shall be swallowed up by the sea. At the same time the non-white races within the Empire show no signs of enthusiastic contentment at the prospect of existing, like the English 'poor' during the eighteenth century, as the mere material of other men's virtues. They too have their own vague ideas of nationality; and if those ideas do not ultimately break up our Empire, it will be because they are enlarged and held in check, not by the sentiment of imperial egoism, but by those wider religious and ethical conceptions which pay little heed to imperial or national frontiers. It may, however, be objected by our imperial 'Real-politiker' that cosmopolitan feeling is at this moment both visionary and dangerous, not because, as Mazzini thought, it is psychologically impossible, but because of the plain facts of our military position. Our Empire, they say, will have to fight for its existence against a German or a Russian Empire or both together during the next generation, and our only chance of success is to create that kind of imperial sentiment which has fighting value. If the white inhabitants of the Empire are encouraged to think of themselves as a 'dominant race,' that is to say as both a homogeneous nation and a natural aristocracy, they will soon be hammered by actual fighting into a Bismarckian temper of imperial 'egoism.' Among the non-white inhabitants of the Empire (since either side in the next inter-imperial war will, after its first serious defeat, abandon the convention of only employing European troops against Europeans) we must discover and drill those races who like the Gurkhas and the Soudanese, may be expected to fight for us and to hate our enemies without asking for political rights. In any case we, like Bismarck, must extirpate, as the most fatal solvent of empire, that humanitarianism which concerns itself with the interests of our future opponents as well as those of our fellow-subjects.