I have never been able to share or sympathise with Mr. Chamberlain’s vision of the British Empire; the very thought of it has always filled me, in fact, with severe depression. It was a sort of Prussian pie without the crust—and half-baked at that: there was to be restriction, canalisation, and stereotyping by diplomacy and consent instead of by militarism and force. England was to be the workshop of the Empire, with some pleasant rooms over it; the Dominions were to be granaries, lumber-warehouses, bacon-factories, mines, vineyards, and wool-farms; the Crown Colonies were to supply sugar and spice and all things nice. It was a thoroughly Prussian conception, not because it involved cruelty—which, after all, was only incidental to Prussianism—but because it was at war with the idea of the natural growth of an immature community towards full nationhood, with distinctive arts, tastes, and schemes of life generally. In all his visionary materialism I think Mr. Chamberlain was most disastrously wrong; it was his whole notion of Imperial relations, and not his incidental disrespect for the principles of Free Trade, that seemed to me most inconsistent with his original Liberalism. But it is questionable whether he was ever a true Liberal; certainly, he was never a lover of freedom. His Birmingham mayoralty, excellent in its results, was more or less an amiable dictatorship; and Mr. Russell, in his _Portraits of the Seventies_, has told us that Gladstone once likened him to Gambetta, as _un homme autoritaire_. His likeness to Mr. Lloyd George has often been remarked; in nothing is it more apparent than in this, that both have such small respect for individual liberty, and both would much rather reform the people than let the people do their own reforming. But a democrat Mr. Chamberlain always remained, even when he was in closest co-operation with the Tory leaders. He never lost his first interest in the betterment of the working classes; the sight of preventible misery he hated; and the whole bent of his mind was humanitarian. But, just as a Liberal is not always a democrat, so a democrat is by no means always a Liberal. The idea of Liberalism is giving men freedom to work out their own salvation, with the minimum of State interference with individual liberty; and in certain cases this may imply extreme callousness to private misfortune, as well as considerable favouritism to the top dog. The democratic idea is only concerned with freedom so long as it is likely to operate for equality; of the three items in the Republican motto it lays least stress on liberty, and most on equality and fraternity. Mr. Chamberlain was more inclined to underline fraternity than the other two. He wanted all Englishmen to be brothers, but most of them were to be very little brothers.