A chance to do more, to determine their own destiny

[samiaseo222]

Ch'in and Han and Weiand Ch'u were; or unless there are no, or insignificantly few, conquered, as was the case when the Han expanded East and North to the borders of modern China and as the British did in Canada and Australia and to a lesser extent New Zealand and Southern Africa. The British, like the Chinese, could have confined the lands they ruled to the lands they settled, and perhaps built a greater Britain as the Han built a Greater China. So did Sir Frederick Grover Seeley advocate in 1883, an idea whose time has almost certainly now gone, pace Sir Frederick's faint modern echoers. But here was the only good for the British peoples that might have come from the British Empire.

If, like the Han, they had stayed one nation in a bigger phone number list territory, not one nation ruling many. In a sense, under my earlier definition, the one enduring Empire, China, is not one at all, for nearly all its subjects are ethnically, culturally and by their own wish Han. China is not an empire in the Roman or British sense at all, but the planet's biggest nation, which is why it alone has not fallen, why alone its heartland nation was not culturally and ethnically swamped by those it conquered, why China, the Han nation, has survived down the millennia.

For nations endure. Peoples endure. They deserve, perhaps, and in that freedom flourish. Better a world of many small states, each contributing its own distinct and diverse note to the orchestra of human culture and civilization, than the striving of Imperial superpowers, each seeking to blare the others into silence, a silence imposed in the future perhaps by their atomic fire upon us all. The time of Empire must pass. The time of nations must come, or all the World will become one Empire, ruled by the multinational octopus of greed, all her peoples sapped and stifled as the Romans and the Ottomans and the Mongols were. And when that last and greatest of the Empires falls, it will fall for ever. And civilization with it.