In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are difficult to localize. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger Robespierre--"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendémiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola, two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose of Osorius[1] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the "principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now impressing the whole earth by its majesty--the Ideal of Imperial Britain.