ABSTRACT
With an empire covering 12.5 million square miles, inhabited by 450 million people – a quarter of the human race – one might ask why England, having already appropriated the proud Spanish slogan ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’, did not also adapt to its own use the even prouder motto of the Austrian Habsburgs, AEIOU (‘Angliae est imperare orbi universo’, England’s destiny is to rule the world). Was not her empire, as Joseph Chamberlain proclaimed,’ an empire such as no other empire in the world will ever be able to rival, in size, in population, in wealth, in diversity of resources’? One is more inclined to seek a comparison elsewhere – with the Roman empire. For one has to go back to the last days of Rome to find such widespread uniformity of government, institutions, language, even religion, all imposed on peoples so numerous and so disparate. What was there in common between a Newfoundland fisherman and a Ugandan tribal chief, between an Australian miner and a Boer farmer, a Bengali peasant and a New Zealand sheep farmer? Yet the Imperium Britannicum majestically affirmed the unity of its civilizing power:
One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!
