the sphere of political observation, avoiding all contact with Europe except by trade at the seaports, unaffected by disturbance from the West, and sheltered on the East by a broad ocean. It is not much more than a century since the Europeans began to encroach seriously upon Asia, and before that time the Asiatic founders of permanent dominion came from the North-East. The old migratory hordes that swept across Asia into Europe and planted dynasties in the West were Turks and Mongols; the only great empire that has existed in India before our own was founded by Moghuls; in Persia and Turkey the ruling families belong to a Turkish tribe of North-Eastern origin. The Arabs did indeed overrun Western Asia, but though they changed its religion, they established no durable rulerships. It would seem as if the true reservoir of Asiatic forces lay among the population of a region with which Europe has only very recently come into effective contact. Now that our political explorations have reached the further side of the continent, we are discovering, not without anxiety, that by forcing open the gates of commerce with the industrial races of Asia we have let out upon ourselves a flood of formidable competition. It is clear that the yellow races have not been overtaken by the depression that has been spreading over the Asiatic kingdoms in the West, nor have they yet passed under the dominant influence or the administration of Europe. On the contrary, they are so using their intercourse with European nations as to appropriate our inventions and extend their commerce without forfeiting their independence; and up to the outbreak of the Chinese war they had avoided that most perilous snare, the European money market. In this manner Japan has achieved a transformation that is without precedent in the history of Asia. The war between China and Japan will have forced most of us to modify our fixed ideas regarding the immemorial unchanging East, as it used to be called in prose and poetry; and it may prove to be the beginning of the new era in which the militant, industrial, and administrative inventions by which Europe has hitherto prevailed easily over Asia will be turned against their inventor. Instead of the decrepit dynasties or barbarous chiefships which Europe begins by controlling, and will possibly end by consuming, we have seen the only two independent Asiatic powers falling into violent collision; we have a young, active, and ambitious government assaulting an unwieldy old-fashioned empire whose weight had for centuries steadied all Eastern Asia; kindling again the fire of war and conquest which has been smothered out in the West, and acting without regard for the interests or wishes of the European powers, who stood by awaiting the outcome. What is likely to be the effect upon Japan and upon China of this unexpected eruption of the old Asiatic volcano? Japan will probably become a firstclass naval power in the China seas, to the infinite advantage of her commercial enterprise and foreign trade, which are driving European

goods out of the markets of the Far East. China has been humbled, has lost Korea and Formosa, and has submitted to a heavy indemnity; but on the other hand it may be that nothing less than this violent shock could have roused her government from the deadly lethargy into which it has been sinking. Such a blow may break down the monopoly of the literary officials, may bring out any latent vigour or leadership that can be found among China's immense population, and may thus enable her, if she recovers from it, to guard against being a second time caught unarmed and half asleep. If the result is to substitute a strong government for a supine one, and to make China lose no time in arming herself at all points, it is certain that the three hundred millions of industrious and ingenious people who inhabit her fertile lands provide ample resources for the erection of a formidable military empire. This may come to pass in a generation or two, if China holds together and avoids financial embarrassment, and then will Pearson's prophecy have been so far fulfilled that the European will be barred out from conquest and commerce in Eastern Asia, while in all those provinces that have been recently detached from Chinese suzerainty, his position will be much less comfortable than it is at present. The sense of nationality will be created or confirmed, as it usually is, by the stress of international conflict; or at any rate the dislike of foreigners will be intensified within the empire. The new spirit may even spread abroad over neighbouring countries where a kind of national feeling is already being stimulated by foreign rule. For what Mommsen said of the Romans, that by their conquest the Gaulish nationality was not destroyed, as some have supposed, but created, may be considered instructively in its application to the tendency of things in India.

The speculation, therefore, which the recent war suggests is that, if the rude lesson given by Japan to China teaches her to set up armaments on the European scale and pattern, we shall have in the East two powers very different from the worn-out monarchies of Western and Central Asia, and intrinsically stronger than any foreign rulership can be that has occupied a country where it cannot acclimatise. And since one of the principal factors of European conquest, eastward and westward, has hitherto been superiority of arms and discipline, so it is now important to observe that Europe has latterly opened a huge workshop and magazine for the supply of arms and ammunition to the rest of the world, from savage African tribes to great Asiatic governments. The mutual jealousy of European powers induces them to check each other by supplying arms to any tribe or potentate who may be thereby encouraged to oppose the progress of a rival. This flourishing business is neither creditable to Christendom nor will it, I believe, bring anything but eventual disadvantage to the cause of Western commerce and civilisation generally, or of permanent dominion in the East. It can hardly fail

to go a long way towards diminishing the odds against Asiatics (always superior in number) in combating the trained soldiers of Europe; particularly since, as trade extends with the facility of penetrating everywhere, there will soon be no possibility of controlling the supply. It will strengthen the hands of able despots who can set up and manage a standing army to be used at first for crushing out local liberties and tribal independence, and afterwards for signifying to any European rulership on their frontier that it has no longer to deal with feeble or ignorant or submissive neighbours. The present attitude of Abyssinia is in this respect significant. Neither France nor Italy cares to meddle with her, and it would be totally impossible now for England to repeat the expedition of 1868.

It seems to me, in short, that those who believe the tide of European predominance in Asia to be still rising must take into account the growth of various forces and circumstances which hold it in check and throw it backward. The paramount fact that all the temperate zone is virtually occupied by firmly planted nationalities or strong governments, has altered and is transforming the course and character of the vicissitudes of dominion. The old conquests, wherever they were permanent, rested upon multitudinous invasion, upon intermixture of races, and upon acclimatisation. The armies or hordes subdued a country, settled down among the people, intermarried with them, imposed new customs and creeds or adopted those of the subject races. All this blending of blood, of manners, and of religions produced material and moral acclimatisation, whereby the ruling or foreign element usually consolidated its dominion. Where there was no great difference between the conquering and the subject races, this process went on easily enough; where the difference, particularly in climate, was great, it went on slowly, and the rulers maintained their military superiority by constant importations of their own folk. There has always been an indraw from the cool uplands of Central Asia, which breed martial tribes, into the low-lying fertile regions inhabited by industrious but comparatively unwarlike populations. The weak and wealthy countries have attracted hardy men from the comparatively barren highlands, whose dominion has lasted until the original stock had so far deteriorated that it could not resist the vigour of a new invasion. The history of Europe shows that this natural succession of tribal conquests formerly went on to some extent in our continent, although the general uniformity of climate does not give us such well-marked phenomena. In Europe, however, the era of migrations and invasions on a large scale has long passed away. Throughout the greater part of Asia also it would seem to have closed, for the weight of European ascendancy fixes down the kingdoms and prescribes limits to their territories; and this immobility of the populations is remarkably illustrated by the Indian census of 1891. Formerly there was a continual influx

into India from the North-West, as is proved by the variety of origins clearly perceptible in the North Indian people; but as these were all military immigrants following in the wake of conquest, and as the era of invasion by land has closed for the present, we find by the census of 1891 that there is now very little immigration from outside India. Among a population of three hundred millions, no more than 660,000 were born outside the country, and this number includes 115,000 Europeans and Americans, almost all of whom are merely sojourners in the land. The proportion of bona fide settlers in India must in fact be very small.

But this same ascendency which has closed the migratory period has substituted a new species of dominion for the old rulerships that rested, as I have said, on invasion, settlement, intermarriage, and acclimatisation. The new European dominion rests on no such foundations it relies entirely on superiority in arms, on skilful administration, and on commerce. The fundamental characteristic which differentiates it from Asiatic and American dominion of the old type is that the European possessions in Asia are retained as dependencies of an alien race and a distant metropolis. For the Asiatic conqueror always established a separate rulership, unless he could incorporate his conquered lands into a mere adjacent province of his native country, being usually incapable of governing from a distance. The secret of the long dominion of the Arabs in Spain, the longest in the whole record of foreign dominations, is probably that it was an independent dominion of a settled race. It would have been impossible to hold Spain as a province of some great Arab empire in North Africa. And we may guess that one reason why Alexander's generals founded durable dynasties in Syria, Egypt, and even in remote Bactria, may have been that the great conqueror's death broke up his vast conquests into separate sovereignties, which could never have been held together as provinces of a Macedonian empire.

Instead, therefore, of the system of successive independent sovereignties, we have now the system of dependencies, ruled from a distant metropolis. Now we know that whenever a dependency has been actually colonised by emigrants of the ruling race, the connexion with the metropolis grows weaker and weaker, until, as in North and South America, it is violently broken. It is true that in Spanish and Portuguese America it lasted 300 years; but that dominion was largely of the Asiatic type: it drew much strength from intermixture of races and partial acclimatisation. The new species of European dominion in Asia strikes no such root into the soil. The old dominions, moreover, had another method of planting themselves in a foreign soil that has been necessarily abandoned by the civilised rulers of the present day. For Europeans who go out to govern a modern Asiatic dependency usually take with them from home their

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wives and their political principles, and among those principles they always export the rule of strict religious neutrality. On the other hand, the old-fashioned invaders and conquistadores very rarely brought their wives-they were wont to leave morality, whether public or private, at home-but wherever a dominion was founded there the religion of the conquerors was sedulously propagated. The Mahomedans stamped the faith of Islam into all their subject peoples so deeply that except in Spain it has never since lost ground. The Spaniards, who in the fifteenth century had just succeeded in exterminating Islam at home, set themselves deliberately to obliterate the indigenous beliefs in America, and their success has been complete. All Mexico and South America were compelled into the Roman Catholic faith by the Spaniards and Portuguese: the native worships were relentlessly trampled out; the monuments and records were destroyed; the rites were transformed where they could not be wholly eradicated. Religious authority became incorporate in the Church of Rome, which thus acquired enormous power over the domesticated Indian races, whether pure or of the half-blood. And the political value justly attached to this spiritual dominion may be measured by the fact that up to very recent times the superior priesthood was carefully restricted to home-bred Spaniards-even the Creoles, or pure Spaniards of American parentage, being altogether excluded; while as the whole ecclesiastical patronage lay, not with the Pope, but with the king's government at Madrid, it could be the more easily used as an engine for political control. No one would deny, and no one should attempt to excuse, the abominable persecution of which both Islam and Roman Christianity were often guilty. But it is impossible not to admit that in many instances the successful propagation of a superior or stronger creed has been favourable to political amalgamation, nor can there be any doubt of the intense fusing power that belongs to a common religion. In our day the decree of divorce between religion and politics has been made absolute by the judgment of every statesman, above all for Christian rulers in non-Christian countries; nevertheless Hobbes's saying in The Leviathan that the religion of the Gentiles was a part of their policy' might be applied to the policy of the Spaniards in the New World, and is of course still true in regard to Mahomedans everywhere.

The main object of Macaulay's well-known criticism upon Mr. Gladstone's book, The State in its Relations with the Church (1839), was to overthrow the position that a government, in its collective character, must profess a religion, and is also bound to propagate it. These two eminent politicians were in fact the champions of the ancient and the modern idea of sovereignty. Mr. Gladstone quoted Hooker's saying that the religious duty of kings was the weightiest part of their sovereignty'; while Macaulay insisted that the main end of government, to which all other ends must be entirely sub