In political life, in the life-history of states, as in religious, as in intellectual and social history, change and growth, or what we now name Evolution, are perpetual, continuous, unresting. The empire which has ceased to advance has begun to recede. Motion is the law of its being, if not towards a fuller life, motion toward death. Thus in a race dowered with the genius for empire, as Rome was, as Britain is, Imperialism is the supreme, the crowning form, which in this process of evolution it attains. The civic, the feudal, or the oligarchic State passes into the national, the national into the imperial, by slow or swift gradations, but irresistibly, as by a fixed law of nature. No great statesman is ever in advance of, or ever behind, his age. The patriot is he who is most faithful to the highest form, to the actualized ideal of his time. Eliot in the seventeenth century died for the constitutional rights of a nation; in the thirteenth he would have stood with the feudal lords at Runnymede; in the nineteenth he would have added his great name to imperialism. The national is thus but a phase in the onward movement of an imperial State, of a race destined to empire. In such a State, Nationality has no peculiar sanctity, no fixed, immutable influence, no absolute sway. The term National, indeed, has recently acquired in politics and in literature something of the halo which in the beginning of the century belonged to the idea of liberty alone. The part which it has played in Bohemia and Hungary, Belgium and Holland, Servia and Bulgaria, and, above all, in the unity of Italy and the realization after four centuries of Machiavelli's dream, is a living witness of its power. In the Middle Age the two ideas, nationality and independence, were inseparable, but with the completion of the State system of Europe, the rise of Prussia and the transformation of the half-oriental Muscovy into the Empire of the Czars, and with the growth in European politics of the Balance-of-Power[2] theory, a disruption occurred between these ideas, and a series of protected nationalities arose.