When the war began, South Africa had no British regular garrisons, but the Boers, a people who had lost their nation in war with her fifteen years before, took up arms under her flag to invade a German colony. India without a parliament, India ruled by English governors, sent her troops to fight in France. In place of sedition, loyalty from a brave and hardy white people of another race and from hundreds of millions of brown men! Such power is not gained by war, but by the policy of fair play; of live and let live. Measurably, she held in trust those distant lands for the other progressive nations; she was the policeman of wide domains. Certainly no neutral, at least no American, envied her the task. Certainly no neutral, for selfish reasons if for no other, would want to risk chaos throughout the world by the transfer of that power to another nation. England was satiated, as Admiral Mahan said. She had gained all that she cared to hold. It is not too much to say that, of late years, colonies might come begging to her doorstep and be refused. Those who held her wealth were complacent as well as satiated--which was her danger. For complacency goes with satiation. But she, too, was suffering from having skimmed the cream, for want of mines and concessions as rich as those which had filled her coffers, and from the demand of the increased population become used to a higher rate of living. Her vast, accumulated wealth in investments the world over was in relatively few hands. In no great European country, perhaps, was wealth more unevenly distributed. Her old age pensions and many social reforms of recent years arose from a restlessness, locally intensified but not alone of local origin. Another flag was appearing too frequently in her channel. A wedge was being forced into her complacency. A competitor who worked twelve hours a day, while complacency preferred eight or ten, met the Englishman at every turn. A navy was growing in the Baltic; taxes pressed heavily on complacency to keep up a navy stronger than the young rival’s. Who really was to blame for the clerks’ pay being kept down, while the cost of living went up? That cheap-living German clerk! What capitalist was pressing the English capitalist? The German! The newspapers were always hinting at the German danger. Certain interests in England, as in any other country, were glad to find a scapegoat. Why should Germany want colonies when England ruled her colonies so well? Germany--always Germany, whatever way you looked, Germany with her seventy millions, aggressive, enterprising, industrious, organised! The pressure of the wedge kept increasing. Something must break. Does any one doubt that if Germany had been in England’s place she would have struck the rival in the egg? But that is not the way of complacency. Nor is it the way of that wisdom of moderation, that live and let live, which has kept the British Empire intact.