We talk of the need of 'protecting European civilisation' from hostile domination, German or Russian. It is a danger. Other great civilisations have found themselves dominated by alien power. Seeley has sketched for us the process by which a vast country with two or three hundred million souls, not savage or uncivilised but with a civilisation, though descending along a different stream of tradition, as real and ancient as our own, came to be utterly conquered and subdued by a people, numbering less than twelve millions, living on the other side of the world. It reversed the teaching of history which had shown again and again that it was impossible really to conquer an intelligent people alien in tradition from its invaders. The whole power of Spain could not in eighty years conquer the Dutch provinces with their petty population. The Swiss could not be conquered. At the very time when the conquest of India's hundreds of millions was under way, the English showed themselves wholly unable to reduce to obedience three millions of their own race in America. What was the explanation? The Inherent Superiority of the Anglo-Saxon Stock? For long we were content to draw such a flattering conclusion and leave it at that, until Seeley pointed out the uncomfortable fact that the great bulk of the forces used in the conquest of India were not British at all. They were Indian. India was conquered for Great Britain by the natives of India. 'The nations of India (says Seeley) have been conquered by an army of which, on the average, about a fifth part was English. India can hardly be said to have been conquered at all by foreigners; she was rather conquered by herself. If we were justified, which we are not, in personifying India as we personify France or England, we could not describe her as overwhelmed by a foreign enemy; we should rather have to say that she elected to put an end to anarchy by submitting to a single government, even though that government were in the hands of foreigners.'[57] In other words, India is an English possession because the peoples of India were incapable of cohesion, the nations of India incapable of internationalism. The peoples of India include some of the best fighting stock in the world. But they fought one another: the pugnacity and material power they personified was the force used by their conquerors for their subjection. I will venture to quote what I wrote some years ago touching Seeley's moral:-- 'Our successful defeat of tyranny depends upon such a development of the sense of patriotism among the democratic nations that it will attach itself rather to the conception of the unity of all free co-operative societies, than to the mere geographical and racial divisions; a development that will enable it to organise itself as a cohesive power for the defence of that ideal, by the use of all the forces, moral and material, which it wields.