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Title: The Expansion Of Europe

Author: Ramsay Muir

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THE EXPANSION OF EUROPE

THE CULMINATION OF MODERN HISTORY

BY RAMSAY MUIR

PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

SECOND EDITION

TO MY MOTHER

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is twofold.

We realise to-day, as never before, that the fortunes of the

world, and of every individual in it, are deeply affected by the
problems of world-politics and by the imperial expansion and the
imperial rivalries of the greater states of Western civilisation.
But when men who have given no special attention to the history of
these questions try to form a sound judgment on them, they find
themselves handicapped by the lack of any brief and clear resume
of the subject. I have tried, in this book, to provide such a
summary, in the form of a broad survey, unencumbered with detail,
but becoming fuller as it comes nearer to our own time. That is my
first purpose. In fulfilling it I have had to cover much well-
trodden ground. But I hope I have avoided the aridity of a mere
compendium of facts.

My second purpose is rather more ambitious. In the course of my

narrative I have tried to deal with ideas rather than with mere
facts. I have tried to bring out the political ideas which are
implicit in, or which result from, the conquest of the world by
Western civilisation; and to show how the ideas of the West have
affected the outer world, how far they have been modified to meet
its needs, and how they have developed in the process. In
particular I have endeavoured to direct attention to the
significant new political form which we have seen coming into
existence, and of which the British Empire is the oldest and the
most highly developed example--the world-state, embracing peoples
of many different types, with a Western nation-state as its
nucleus. The study of this new form seems to me to be a neglected
branch of political science, and one of vital importance. Whether
or not it is to be a lasting form, time alone will show. Finally I
have tried to display, in this long imperialist conflict, the
strife of two rival conceptions of empire: the old, sterile, and
ugly conception which thinks of empire as mere domination,
ruthlessly pursued for the sole advantage of the master, and which
seems to me to be most fully exemplified by Germany; and the
nobler conception which regards empire as a trusteeship, and which
is to be seen gradually emerging and struggling towards victory
over the more brutal view, more clearly and in more varied forms
in the story of the British Empire than in perhaps any other part
of human history. That is why I have given a perhaps
disproportionate attention to the British Empire. The war is
determining, among other great issues, which of these conceptions
is to dominate the future.

In its first form this book was completed in the autumn of 1916;
and it contained, as I am bound to confess, some rather acidulated
sentences in the passages which deal with the attitude of America
towards European problems. These sentences were due to the deep
disappointment which most Englishmen and most Frenchmen felt with
the attitude of aloofness which America seemed to have adopted
towards the greatest struggle for freedom and justice ever waged
in history. It was an indescribable satisfaction to be forced by
events to recognise that I was wrong, and that these passages of
my book ought not to have been written as I wrote them. There is a
sort of solemn joy in feeling that America, France, and Britain,
the three nations which have contributed more than all the rest of
the world put together to the establishment of liberty and justice
on the earth, are now comrades in arms, fighting a supreme battle
for these great causes. May this comradeship never be broken. May
it bring about such a decision of the present conflict as will
open a new era in the history of the world--a world now unified,
as never before, by the final victory of Western civilisation
which it is the purpose of this book to describe.

Besides rewriting and expanding the passages on America, I have

seized the opportunity of this new issue to alter and enlarge
certain other sections of the book, notably the chapter on the
vital period 1878-1900, which was too slightly dealt with in the
original edition. In this work, which has considerably increased
the size of the book, I have been much assisted by the criticisms
and suggestions of some of my reviewers, whom I wish to thank.

Perhaps I ought to add that though this book is complete in

itself, it is also a sort of sequel to a little book entitled
Nationalism and Internationalism, and was originally designed to
be printed along with it: that is the explanation of sundry
footnote references. The two volumes are to be followed by a
third, on National Self-government, and it is my hope that the
complete series may form a useful general survey of the
development of the main political factors in modern history.

In its first form the book had the advantage of being read by my
friend Major W. L. Grant, Professor of Colonial History at Queen's
University Kingston, Ontario. The pressure of the military duties
in which he is engaged has made it impossible for me to ask his
aid in the revision of the book.

R. M. July 1917

CONTENTS

Preface
I. The Meaning and the Motives of Imperialism
II. The Era of Iberian Monopoly
III. The Rivalry of the Dutch, the French, and
the English, 1588-1763
(a) The Period of Settlement, 1588-1660
(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713
(c) The Conflict of French and English, 1713-1763
IV. The Era of Revolution, 1763-1825
V. Europe and the Non-European World, 1815-1878
VI. The Transformation of the British Empire, 1815-1878
VII. The Era of the World States, 1878-1900
VIII. The British Empire amid the World-Powers, 1878-1914
IX. The Great Challenge, 1900-1914
X. What of the Night?

THE MEANING AND THE MOTIVES OF IMPERIALISM

One of the most remarkable features of the modern age has been the
extension of the influence of European civilisation over the whole
world. This process has formed a very important element in the
history of the last four centuries, and it has been strangely
undervalued by most historians, whose attention has been too
exclusively centred upon the domestic politics, diplomacies, and
wars of Europe. It has been brought about by the creation of a
succession of 'Empires' by the European nations, some of which
have broken up, while others survive, but all of which have
contributed their share to the general result; and for that reason
the term 'Imperialism' is commonly employed to describe the spirit
which has led to this astonishing and world-embracing movement of
the modern age.

The terms 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' are in some respects

unfortunate, because of the suggestion of purely military dominion
which they convey; and their habitual employment has led to some
unhappy results. It has led men of one school of thought to
condemn and repudiate the whole movement, as an immoral product of
brute force, regardless of the rights of conquered peoples. They
have refused to study it, and have made no endeavour to understand
it; not realising that the movement they were condemning was as
inevitable and as irresistible as the movement of the tides--and
as capable of being turned to beneficent ends. On the other hand,
the implications of these terms have perhaps helped to foster in
men of another type of mind an unhealthy spirit of pride in mere
domination, as if that were an end in itself, and have led them to
exult in the extension of national power, without closely enough
considering the purposes for which it was to be used. Both
attitudes are deplorable, and in so far as the words 'Empire,'
'Imperial,' and 'Imperialism' tend to encourage them, they are
unfortunate words. They certainly do not adequately express the
full significance of the process whereby the civilisation of
Europe has been made into the civilisation of the world.

Nevertheless the words have to be used, because there are no

others which at all cover the facts. And, after all, they are in
some ways entirely appropriate. A great part of the world's area
is inhabited by peoples who are still in a condition of barbarism,
and seem to have rested in that condition for untold centuries.
For such peoples the only chance of improvement was that they
should pass under the dominion of more highly developed peoples;
and to them a European 'Empire' brought, for the first time, not
merely law and justice, but even the rudiments of the only kind of
liberty which is worth having, the liberty which rests upon law.
Another vast section of the world's population consists of peoples
who have in some respects reached a high stage of civilisation,
but who have failed to achieve for themselves a mode of
organisation which could give them secure order and equal laws.
For such peoples also the 'Empire' of Western civilisation, even
when it is imposed and maintained by force, may bring advantages
which will far outweigh its defects. In these cases the word
'Empire' can be used without violence to its original
significance, and yet without apology; and these cases cover by
far the greater part of the world.

The words 'Empire' and 'Imperialism' come to us from ancient Rome;

and the analogy between the conquering and organising work of Rome
and the empire-building work of the modern nation-states is a
suggestive and stimulating analogy. The imperialism of Rome
extended the modes of a single civilisation, and the Reign of Law
which was its essence, over all the Mediterranean lands. The
imperialism of the nations to which the torch of Rome has been
handed on, has made the Reign of Law, and the modes of a single
civilisation, the common possession of the whole world. Rome made
the common life of Europe possible. The imperial expansion of the
European nations has alone made possible the vision--nay, the
certainty--of a future world-order. For these reasons we may
rightly and without hesitation continue to employ these terms,
provided that we remember always that the justification of any
dominion imposed by a more advanced upon a backward or
disorganised people is to be found, not in the extension of mere
brute power, but in the enlargement and diffusion, under the
shelter of power, of those vital elements in the life of Western
civilisation which have been the secrets of its strength, and the
greatest of its gifts to the world: the sovereignty of a just and
rational system of law, liberty of person, of thought, and of
speech, and, finally, where the conditions are favourable, the
practice of self-government and the growth of that sentiment of
common interest which we call the national spirit. These are the
features of Western civilisation which have justified its conquest
of the world [Footnote: See the first essay in Nationalism and
Internationalism, in which an attempt is made to work out this
idea]; and it must be for its success or failure in attaining
these ends that we shall commend or condemn the imperial work of
each of the nations which have shared in this vast achievement.

Four main motives can be perceived at work in all the imperial

activities of the European peoples during the last four centuries.
The first, and perhaps the most potent, has been the spirit of
national pride, seeking to express itself in the establishment of
its dominion over less highly organised peoples. In the exultation
which follows the achievement of national unity each of the
nation-states in turn, if the circumstances were at all
favourable, has been tempted to impose its power upon its
neighbours,[Footnote: Nationalism and Imperialism, pp. 60, 64,
104.] or even to seek the mastery of the world. From these
attempts have sprung the greatest of the European wars. From them
also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states.
It is no mere coincidence that all the great colonising powers
have been unified nation-states, and that their imperial
activities have been most vigorous when the national sentiment was
at its strongest among them. Spain, Portugal, England, France,
Holland, Russia: these are the great imperial powers, and they are
also the great nation-states. Denmark and Sweden have played a
more modest part, in extra-European as in European affairs.
Germany and Italy only began to conceive imperial ambitions after
their tardy unification in the nineteenth century. Austria, which
has never been a nation-state, never became a colonising power.
Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for dominion, may be
regarded as the chief source of imperialism; and if its effects
are unhappy when it tries to express itself at the expense of
peoples in whom the potentiality of nationhood exists, they are
not necessarily unhappy in other cases. When it takes the form of
the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and
development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration
and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may prove
itself a beneficent force. But it is beneficent only in so far as
it leads to an enlargement of law and liberty.

The second of the blended motives of imperial expansion has been

the desire for commercial profits; and this motive has played so
prominent a part, especially in our own time, that we are apt to
exaggerate its force, and to think of it as the sole motive. No
doubt it has always been present in some degree in all imperial
adventures. But until the nineteenth century it probably formed
the predominant motive only in regard to the acquisition of
tropical lands. So long as Europe continued to be able to produce
as much as she needed of the food and the raw materials for
industry that her soil and climate were capable of yielding, the
commercial motive for acquiring territories in the temperate zone,
which could produce only commodities of the same type, was
comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas,
which we have come to regard as the most important products of the
imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be
mainly attributed to other than commercial motives. But Europe has
always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics: gold
and ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a
very early age found their way into Europe from India and the
East, coming by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of
the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Until the end of the
fifteenth century the European trader had no direct contact with
the sources of these precious commodities; the supply of them was
scanty and the price high. The desire to gain a more direct access
to the sources of this traffic, and to obtain control of the
supply, formed the principal motive for the great explorations.
But these, in their turn, disclosed fresh tropical areas worth
exploiting, and introduced new luxuries, such as tobacco and tea,
which soon took rank as necessities. They also brought a colossal
increment of wealth to the countries which had undertaken them.
Hence the acquisition of a share in, or a monopoly of, these
lucrative lines of trade became a primary object of ambition to
all the great states. In the nineteenth century Europe began to be
unable to supply her own needs in regard to the products of the
temperate zone, and therefore to desire control over other areas
of this type; but until then it was mainly in regard to the
tropical or sub-tropical areas that the commercial motive formed
the predominant element in the imperial rivalries of the nation-
states. And even to-day it is over these areas that their
conflicts are most acute.

A third motive for imperial expansion, which must not be

overlooked, is the zeal for propaganda: the eagerness of virile
peoples to propagate the religious and political ideas which they
have adopted. But this is only another way of saying that nations
are impelled upon the imperial career by the desire to extend the
influence of their conception of civilisation, their Kultur. In
one form or another this motive has always been present. At first
it took the form of religious zeal. The spirit of the Crusaders
was inherited by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, whose whole
history had been one long crusade against the Moors. When the
Portuguese started upon the exploration of the African coast, they
could scarcely have sustained to the end that long and arduous
task if they had been allured by no other prospect than the
distant hope of finding a new route to the East. They were buoyed
up also by the desire to strike a blow for Christianity. They
expected to find the mythical Christian empire of Prester John,
and to join hands with him in overthrowing the infidel. When
Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile to supply the means
for his madcap adventure, it was by a double inducement that he
won her assent: she was to gain access to the wealth of the
Indies, but she was also to be the means of converting the heathen
to a knowledge of Christianity; and this double motive continually
recurs in the early history of the Spanish Empire. France could
scarcely, perhaps, have persisted in maintaining her far from
profitable settlements on the barren shores of the St. Lawrence if
the missionary motive had not existed alongside of the motives of
national pride and the desire for profits: her great work of
exploration in the region of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi
Valley was due quite as much to the zeal of the heroic
missionaries of the Jesuit and other orders as to the enterprise
of trappers and traders. In English colonisation, indeed, the
missionary motive was never, until the nineteenth century, so
strongly marked. But its place was taken by a parallel political
motive. The belief that they were diffusing the free institutions
in which they took so much pride certainly formed an element in
the colonial activities of the English. It is both foolish and
unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda in the
imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by
the colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial
expansion, as of other human activities, are mixed, and the
loftier elements in them are not often predominant. But the
loftier elements are always present. It is hypocrisy to pretend
that they are alone or even chiefly operative. But it is cynicism
wholly to deny their influence. And of the two sins cynicism is
the worse, because by over-emphasising it strengthens and
cultivates the lower among the mixed motives by which men are
ruled.

The fourth of the governing motives of imperial expansion is the

need of finding new homes for the surplus population of the
colonising people. This was not in any country a very powerful
motive until the nineteenth century, for over-population did not
exist in any serious degree in any of the European states until
that age. Many of the political writers in seventeenth-century
England, indeed, regarded the whole movement of colonisation with
alarm, because it seemed to be drawing off men who could not be
spared. But if the population was nowhere excessive, there were in
all countries certain classes for which emigration to new lands
offered a desired opportunity. There were the men bitten with the
spirit of adventure, to whom the work of the pioneer presented an
irresistible attraction. Such men are always numerous in virile
communities, and when in any society their numbers begin to
diminish, its decay is at hand. The imperial activities of the
modern age have more than anything else kept the breed alive in
all European countries, and above all in Britain. To this type
belonged the conquistadores of Spain, the Elizabethan seamen, the
French explorers of North America, the daring Dutch navigators.
Again, there were the younger sons of good family for whom the
homeland presented small opportunities, but who found in colonial
settlements the chance of creating estates like those of their
fathers at home, and carried out with them bands of followers
drawn from among the sons of their fathers' tenantry. To this
class belonged most of the planter-settlers of Virginia, the
seigneurs of French Canada, the lords of the great Portuguese
feudal holdings in Brazil, and the dominant class in all the
Spanish colonies. Again, there were the 'undesirables' of whom the
home government wanted to be rid--convicts, paupers, political
prisoners; they were drafted out in great numbers to the new
lands, often as indentured servants, to endure servitude for a
period of years and then to be merged in the colonial population.
When the loss of the American colonies deprived Britain of her
dumping-ground for convicts, she had to find a new region in which
to dispose of them; and this led to the first settlement of
Australia, six years after the establishment of American
independence. Finally, in the age of bitter religious controversy
there was a constant stream of religious exiles seeking new homes
in which they could freely follow their own forms of worship. The
Puritan settlers of New England are the outstanding example of
this type. But they were only one group among many. Huguenots from
France, Moravians from Austria, persecuted 'Palatines' and
Salzburgers from Germany, poured forth in an almost unbroken
stream. It was natural that they should take refuge in the only
lands where full religious freedom was offered to them; and these
were especially some of the British settlements in America, and
the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope.

It is often said that the overflow of Europe over the world has
been a sort of renewal of the folk-wandering of primitive ages.
That is a misleading view: the movement has been far more
deliberate and organised, and far less due to the pressure of
external circumstances, than the early movements of peoples in the
Old World. Not until the nineteenth century, when the industrial
transformation of Europe brought about a really acute pressure of
population, can it be said that the mere pressure of need, and the
shortage of sustenance in their older homes, has sent large bodies
of settlers into the new lands. Until that period the imperial
movement has been due to voluntary and purposive action in a far
higher degree than any of the blind early wanderings of peoples.
The will-to-dominion of virile nations exulting in their
nationhood; the desire to obtain a more abundant supply of
luxuries than had earlier been available, and to make profits
therefrom; the zeal of peoples to impose their mode of
civilisation upon as large a part of the world as possible; the
existence in the Western world of many elements of restlessness
and dissatisfaction, adventurers, portionless younger sons, or
religious enthusiasts: these have been the main operative causes
of this huge movement during the greater part of the four
centuries over which it has extended. And as it has sprung from
such diverse and conflicting causes, it has assumed an infinite
variety of forms; and both deserves and demands a more respectful
study as a whole than has generally been given to it.

II

THE ERA OF IBERIAN MONOPOLY

During the Middle Ages the contact of Europe with the rest of the
world was but slight. It was shut off by the great barrier of the
Islamic Empire, upon which the Crusades made no permanent
impression; and although the goods of the East came by caravan to
the Black Sea ports, to Constantinople, to the ports of Syria, and
to Egypt, where they were picked up by the Italian traders, these
traders had no direct knowledge of the countries which were the
sources of their wealth. The threat of the Empire of Genghis Khan
in the thirteenth century aroused the interest of Europe, and the
bold friars, Carpini and Rubruquis, made their way to the centres
of that barbaric sovereign's power in the remote East, and brought
back stories of what they had seen; later the Poli, especially the
great Marco, undertook still more daring and long-continued
journeys, which made India and Cathay less unreal to Europeans,
and stimulated the desire for further knowledge. The later
mediaeval maps of the world, like that of Fra Mauro
(1459),[Footnote: Simplified reproductions of this and the other
early maps alluded to are printed in Philip's Students' Atlas of
Modern History, which also contains a long series of maps
illustrating the extra-Europeans activities of the European
states.] which incorporate this knowledge, are less wildly
imaginative than their predecessors, and show a vague notion of
the general configuration of the main land-masses in the Old
World. But beyond the fringes of the Mediterranean the world was
still in the main unknown to, and unaffected by, European
civilisation down to the middle of the fifteenth century.

Then, suddenly, came the great era of explorations, which were

made possible by the improvements in navigation worked out during
the fifteenth century, and which in two generations incredibly
transformed the aspect of the world. The marvellous character of
this revelation can perhaps be illustrated by the comparison of
two maps, that of Behaim, published in 1492, and that of Schoener,
published in 1523. Apart from its adoption of the theory that the
earth was globular, not round and flat, Behaim's map shows little
advance upon Fra Mauro, except that it gives a clearer idea of the
shape of Africa, due to the earlier explorations of the
Portuguese. But Schoener's map shows that the broad outlines of
the distribution of the land-masses of both hemispheres were
already in 1523 pretty clearly understood. This astonishing
advance was due to the daring and enterprise of the Portuguese
explorers, Diaz, Da Gama, Cabral, and of the adventurers in the
service of Spain, Columbus, Balboa, Vespucci, and--greatest of
them all--Magellan.

These astonishing discoveries placed for a time the destinies of

the outer world in the hands of Spain and Portugal, and the first
period of European imperialism is the period of Iberian monopoly,
extending to 1588. A Papal award in 1493 confirmed the division of
the non-European world between the two powers, by a judgment which
the orthodox were bound to accept, and did accept for two
generations. All the oceans, except the North Atlantic, were
closed to the navigators of other nations; and these two peoples
were given, for a century, the opportunity of showing in what
guise they would introduce the civilisation of Europe to the rest
of the globe. Pioneers as they were in the work of imperial
development, it is not surprising that they should have made great
blunders; and in the end their foreign dominions weakened rather
than strengthened the home countries, and contributed to drag them
down from the high place which they had taken among the nations.

The Portuguese power in the East was never more than a commercial
dominion. Except in Goa, on the west coast of India, no
considerable number of settlers established themselves at any
point; and the Goanese settlement is the only instance of the
formation of a mixed race, half Indian and half European. Wherever
the Portuguese power was established, it proved itself hard and
intolerant; for the spirit of the Crusader was ill-adapted to the
establishment of good relations with the non-Christian peoples.
The rivalry of Arab traders in the Indian Ocean was mercilessly
destroyed, and there was as little mercy for the Italian
merchants, who found the stream of goods that the Arabs had sent
them by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf almost wholly
intercepted. No doubt any other people, finding itself in the
position which the Portuguese occupied in the early sixteenth
century, would have been tempted to use their power in the same
way to establish a complete monopoly; but the success with which
the Portuguese attained their aim was in the end disastrous to
them. It was followed by, if it did not cause, a rapid
deterioration of the ability with which their affairs were
directed; and when other European traders began to appear in the
field, they were readily welcomed by the princes of India and the
chieftains of the Spice Islands. In the West the Portuguese
settlement in Brazil was a genuine colony, or branch of the
Portuguese nation, because here there existed no earlier civilised
people to be dominated. But both in East and West the activities
of the Portuguese were from the first subjected to an over-rigid
control by the home government. Eager to make the most of a great
opportunity for the national advantage, the rulers of Portugal
allowed no freedom to the enterprise of individuals. The result
was that in Portugal itself, in the East, and in Brazil,
initiative was destroyed, and the brilliant energy which this
gallant little nation had displayed evaporated within a century.
It was finally destroyed when, in 1580, Portugal and her empire
fell under the dominion of Spain, and under all the reactionary
influences of the government of Philip II. By the time this heavy
yoke was shaken off, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the
Portuguese dominion had fallen into decay. To-day nothing of it
remains save 'spheres of influence' on the western and eastern
coasts of Africa, two or three ports on the coast of India, the
Azores, and the island of Magao off the coast of China.

The Spanish dominion in Central and South America was of a

different character. When once they had realised that it was not a
new route to Asia, but a new world, that Columbus had discovered
for them, the Spaniards sought no longer mainly for the riches to
be derived from traffic, but for the precious metals, which they
unhappily discovered in slight quantities in Hispaniola, but in
immense abundance in Mexico and Peru. It is impossible to
exaggerate the heroic valour and daring of Cortez, Pizarro,
Hernando de Soto, Orellana, and the rest of the conquistadores who
carved out in a single generation the vast Spanish empire in
Central and South America; but it is equally impossible to
exaggerate their cruelty, which was born in part of the fact that
they were a handful among myriads, in part of the fierce
traditions of crusading warfare against the infidel. Yet without
undervaluing their daring, it must be recognised that they had a
comparatively easy task in conquering the peoples of these
tropical lands. In the greater islands of the West Indies they
found a gentle and yielding people, who rapidly died out under the
forced labour of the mines and plantations, and had to be replaced
by negro slave-labour imported from Africa. In Mexico and Peru
they found civilisations which on the material side were developed
to a comparatively high point, and which collapsed suddenly when
their governments and capitals had been overthrown; while their
peoples, habituated to slavery, readily submitted to a new
servitude. It must be recognised, to the honour of the government
of Charles V. and his successors, that they honestly attempted to
safeguard the usages and possessions of the conquered peoples, and
to protect them in some degree against the exploitation of their
conquerors. But it was the protection of a subject race doomed to
the condition of Helotage; they were protected, as the Jews were
protected by the kings of mediaeval England, because they were a
valuable asset of the crown. The policy of the Spanish government
did not avail to prevent an intermixture of the races, because the
Spaniards themselves came from a sub-tropical country, and the
Mexicans and Peruvians especially were separated from them by no
impassable gulf such as separates the negro or the Australian
bushman from the white man. Central and Southern America thus came
to be peopled by a hybrid race, speaking Spanish, large elements
of which were conscious of their own inferiority. This in itself
would perhaps have been a barrier to progress. But the
concentration of attention upon the precious metals, and the
neglect of industry due to this cause and to the employment of
slave-labour, formed a further obstacle. And in addition to all,
the Spanish government, partly with a view to the execution of its
native policy, partly because it regarded the precious metals as
the chief product of these lands and wished to maintain close
control over them, and partly because centralised autocracy was
carried to its highest pitch in Spain, allowed little freedom of
action to the local governments, and almost none to the settlers.
It treated the trade of these lands as a monopoly of the home
country, to be carried on under the most rigid control. It did
little or nothing to develop the natural resources of the empire,
but rather discouraged them lest they should compete with the
labours of the mine; and in what concerned the intellectual
welfare of its subjects, it limited itself, as in Spain, to
ensuring that no infection of heresy or freethought should reach
any part of its dominions. All this had a deadening effect; and
the surprising thing is, not that the Spanish Empire should have
fallen into an early decrepitude, but that it should have shown
such comparative vigour, tenacity, and power of expansion as it
actually exhibited. Not until the nineteenth century did the vast
natural resources of these regions begin to undergo any rapid
development; that is to say, not until most of the settlements had
discarded the connection with Spain; and even then, the defects
bred into the people by three centuries of reactionary and
unenlightened government produced in them an incapacity to use
their newly won freedom, and condemned these lands to a long
period of anarchy. It would be too strong to say that it would
have been better had the Spaniards never come to America; for,
when all is said, they have done more than any other people, save
the British, to plant European modes of life in the non-European
world. But it is undeniable that their dominion afforded a far
from happy illustration of the working of Western civilisation in
a new field, and exercised a very unfortunate reaction upon the
life of the mother-country.

The conquest of Portugal and her empire by Philip II., in 1580,

turned Spain into a Colossus bestriding the world, and it was
inevitable that this world-dominion should be challenged by the
other European states which faced upon the Atlantic. The challenge
was taken up by three nations, the English, the French, and the
Dutch, all the more readily because the very existence of all
three and the religion of two of them were threatened by the
apparently overwhelming strength of Spain in Europe. As in so many
later instances, the European conflict was inevitably extended to
the non-European world. From the middle of the sixteenth century
onwards these three peoples attempted, with increasing daring, to
circumvent or to undermine the Spanish power, and to invade the
sources of the wealth which made it dangerous to them; but the
attempt, so far as it was made on the seas and beyond them, was in
the main, and for a long time, due to the spontaneous energies of
volunteers, not to the action of governments. Francis I. of France
sent out the Venetian Verazzano to explore the American shores of
the North Atlantic, as Henry VII. of England had earlier sent the
Genoese Cabots. But nothing came of these official enterprises.
More effective were the pirate adventurers who preyed upon the
commerce between Spain and her possessions in the Netherlands as
it passed through the Narrow Seas, running the gauntlet of
English, French, and Dutch. More effective still were the attempts
to find new routes to the East, not barred by the Spanish
dominions, by a north-east or a north-west passage; for some of
the earlier of these adventures led to fruitful unintended
consequences, as when the Englishman Chancellor, seeking for a
north-east passage, found the route to Archangel and opened up a
trade with Russia, or as when the Frenchman Cartier, seeking for a
north-west passage, hit upon the great estuary of the St.
Lawrence, and marked out a claim for France to the possession of
the area which it drained. Most effective of all were the
smuggling and piratical raids into the reserved waters of West
Africa and the West Indies, and later into the innermost
penetralia of the Pacific Ocean, which were undertaken with
rapidly increasing boldness by the navigators of all three
nations, but above all by the English. Drake is the supreme
exponent of these methods; and his career illustrates in the
clearest fashion the steady diminution of Spanish prestige under
these attacks, and the growing boldness and maritime skill of its
attackers.

From the time of Drake's voyage round the world (1577) and its
insulting defiance of the Spanish power on the west coast of South
America, it became plain that the maintenance of Spanish monopoly
could not last much longer. It came to its end, finally and
unmistakably, in the defeat of the Grand Armada. That supreme
victory threw the ocean roads of trade open, not to the English
only, but to the sailors of all nations. In its first great
triumph the English navy had established the Freedom of the Seas,
of which it has ever since been the chief defender. Since 1588 no
power has dreamt of claiming the exclusive right of traversing any
of the open seas of the world, as until that date Spain and
Portugal had claimed the exclusive right of using the South
Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans.

So ends the first period in the imperial expansion of the Western

peoples, the period of Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. Meanwhile,
unnoticed in the West, a remarkable eastward expansion was being
effected by the Russian people. By insensible stages they had
passed the unreal barrier between Europe and Asia, and spread
themselves thinly over the vast spaces of Siberia, subduing and
assimilating the few and scattered tribes whom they met; by the
end of the seventeenth century they had already reached the
Pacific Ocean. It was a conquest marked by no great struggles or
victories, an insensible permeation of half a continent. This
process was made the easier for the Russians, because in their own
stock were blended elements of the Mongol race which they found
scattered over Siberia: they were only reversing the process which
Genghis Khan had so easily accomplished in the thirteenth century.
And as the Russians had scarcely yet begun to be affected by
Western civilisation, there was no great cleavage or contrast
between them and their new subjects, and the process of
assimilation took place easily. But the settlement of Siberia was
very gradual. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the total
population of this vast area amounted to not more than 300,000
souls, and it was not until the nineteenth century that there was
any rapid increase.

III

THE RIVALRY OP THE DUTCH, THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH, 1588-1763

The second period of European imperialism was filled with the

rivalries of the three nations which had in different degrees
contributed to the breakdown of the Spanish monopoly, the Dutch,
the French, and the English; and we have next to inquire how far,
and why, these peoples were more successful than the Spaniards in
planting in the non-European world the essentials of European
civilisation. The long era of their rivalry extended from 1588 to
1763, and it can be most conveniently divided into three sections.
The first of these extended from 1588 to about 1660, and may be
called the period of experiment and settlement; during its course
the leadership fell to the Dutch. The second extended from 1660 to
1713, and may be called the period of systematic colonial policy,
and of growing rivalry between France and England. The third, from
1713 to 1763, was dominated by the intense rivalry of these two
countries, decadent Spain joining in the conflict on the side of
France, while the declining power of the Dutch was on the whole
ranged on the side of Britain; and it ended with the complete
ascendancy of Britain, supreme at once in the West and in the
East.

(a) The Period of Settlement, 1588-1660

The special interest of the first half of the seventeenth century

is that in the trading and colonial experiments of this period the
character of the work which was to be done by the three new
candidates for extra-European empire was already very clearly and
instructively displayed. They met as rivals in every field: in the
archipelago of the West Indies, and the closely connected slaving
establishments of West Africa, in the almost empty lands of North
America, and in the trading enterprises of the far East; and
everywhere a difference of spirit and method appeared.

The Dutch, who made a far more systematic and more immediately
profitable use of the opportunity than either of their rivals,
regarded the whole enterprise as a great national commercial
venture. It was conducted by two powerful trading corporations,
the Company of the East Indies and the Company of the West Indies;
but though directed by the merchants of Amsterdam, these were
genuinely national enterprises; their shareholders were drawn from
every province and every class; and they were backed by all the
influence which the States-General of the United Provinces--
controlled during this period mainly by the commercial interest--
was able to wield.

The Company of the East Indies was the richer and the more
powerful of the two, because the trade of the Far East was beyond
comparison the most lucrative in the world. Aiming straight at the
source of the greatest profits--the trade in spices--the Dutch
strove to establish a monopoly control over the Spice Islands and,
in general, over the Malay Archipelago; and they were so
successful that their influence remains to-day predominant in this
region. Their first task was to overthrow the ascendancy of the
Portuguese, and in this they were willing to co-operate with the
English traders. But the bulk of the work was done by the Dutch,
for the English East India Company was poor in comparison with the
Dutch, was far less efficiently organised, and, in especial, could
not count upon the steady support of the national government. It
was mainly the Dutch who built forts and organised factories,
because they alone had sufficient capital to maintain heavy
standing charges. Not unnaturally they did not see why the English
should reap any part of the advantage of their work, and set
themselves to establish a monopoly. In the end the English were
driven out with violence. After the Massacre of Amboyna (1623)
their traders disappeared from these seas, and the Dutch supremacy
remained unchallenged until the nineteenth century.

It was a quite intolerant commercial monopoly which they had

instituted, but from the commercial point of view it was
administered with great intelligence. Commercial control brought
in its train territorial sovereignty, over Java and many of the
neighbouring islands; and this sovereignty was exercised by the
directors of the company primarily with a view to trade interests.
It was a trade despotism, but a trade despotism wisely
administered, which gave justice and order to its native subjects.
On the mainland of India the Dutch never attained a comparable
degree of power, because the native states were strong enough to
hold them in check. But in this period their factories were more
numerous and more prosperous than those of the English, their
chief rivals; and over the island of Ceylon they established an
ascendancy almost as complete as that which they had created in
the archipelago.

They were intelligent enough also to see the importance of good

calling-stations on the route to the East. For this purpose they
planted a settlement in Mauritius, and another at the Cape of Good
Hope. But these settlements were never regarded as colonies. They
were stations belonging to a trading company; they remained under
its complete control, and were allowed no freedom of development,
still less any semblance of self-government. If Cape Colony grew
into a genuine colony, or offshoot of the mother-country, it was
in spite of the company, not by reason of its encouragement, and
from first to last the company's relations with the settlers were
of the most unhappy kind. For the company would do nothing at the
Cape that was not necessary for the Eastern trade, which was its
supreme interest, and the colonists naturally did not take the
same view. It was this concentration upon purely commercial aims
which also prevented the Dutch from making any use of the superb
field for European settlement opened up by the enterprise of their
explorers in Australia and New Zealand. These fair lands were left
unpeopled, largely because they promised no immediate trade
profits.

In the West the enterprises of the Dutch were only less vigorous
than in the East, and they were marked by the same feature of an
intense concentration upon the purely commercial aspect. While the
English and (still more) the French adventurers made use of the
lesser West Indian islands, unoccupied by Spain, as bases for
piratical attacks upon the Spanish trade, the Dutch, with a shrewd
instinct, early deserted this purely destructive game for the more
lucrative business of carrying on a smuggling trade with the
Spanish mainland; and the islands which they acquired (such as
Curayoa) were, unlike the French and English islands, especially
well placed for this purpose. They established a sugar colony in
Guiana. But their main venture in this region was the conquest of
a large part of Northern Brazil from the Portuguese (1624); and
here their exploitation was so merciless, under the direction of
the Company of the West Indies, that the inhabitants, though they
had been dissatisfied with the Portuguese government, and had at
first welcomed the Dutch conquerors, soon revolted against them,
and after twenty years drove them out.

On the mainland of North America the Dutch planted a single

colony--the New Netherlands, with its capital at New Amsterdam,
later New York. Their commercial instinct had once more guided
them wisely. They had found the natural centre for the trade of
North America; for by way of the river Hudson and its affluent,
the Mohawk, New York commands the only clear path through the
mountain belt which everywhere shuts off the Atlantic coast region
from the central plain of America. Founded and controlled by the
Company of the West Indies, this settlement was intended to be,
not primarily the home of a branch of the Dutch nation beyond the
seas, but a trading-station for collecting the furs and other
products of the inland regions. At Orange (Albany), which stands
at the junction of the Mohawk and the Hudson, the Dutch traders
collected the furs brought in by Indian trappers from west and
north; New Amsterdam was the port of export; and if settlers were
encouraged, it was only that they might supply the men and the
means and the food for carrying on this traffic. The Company of
the West Indies administered the colony purely from this point of
view. No powers of self-government were allowed to the settlers;
and, as in Cape Colony, the relations between the colonists and
the governing company were never satisfactory, because the
colonists felt that their interests were wholly subordinated.

The distinguishing feature of French imperial activity during this

period was its dependence upon the support and direction of the
home government, which was the natural result of the highly
centralised regime established in France during the modern era.
Only in one direction was French activity successfully maintained
by private enterprise, and this was in the not very reputable
field of West Indian buccaneering, in which the French were even
more active than their principal rivals and comrades, the English.
The word 'buccaneer' itself comes from the French: boucan means
the wood-fire at which the pirates dried and smoked their meat,
and these fires, blazing on deserted islands, must often have
warned merchant vessels to avoid an ever-present danger. The
island of Tortuga, which commands the passage between Cuba and
Hispaniola through which the bulk of the Spanish traffic passed on
its way from Mexico to Europe, was the most important of the
buccaneering bases, and although it was at first used by the
buccaneers of all nations, it soon became a purely French
possession, as did, later, the adjoining portion of the island of
Hispaniola (San Domingo). The French did, indeed, like the
English, plant sugar colonies in some of the lesser Antilles; but
during the first half of the seventeenth century they attained no
great prosperity.

For the greater enterprises of trade in the East and colonisation

in the West, the French relied almost wholly upon government
assistance, and although both Henry IV. in the first years of the
century, and Richelieu in its second quarter, were anxious to give
what help they could, internal dissensions were of such frequent
occurrence in France during this period that no systematic or
continuous governmental aid was available. Hence the French
enterprises both in the East and in the West were on a small
scale, and achieved little success. The French East India Company
was all but extinct when Colbert took it in hand in 1664; it was
never able to compete with its Dutch or even its English rival.

But the period saw the establishment of two French colonies in

North America: Acadia (Nova Scotia) on the coast, and Canada, with
Quebec as its centre, in the St. Lawrence valley, separated from
one another on land by an almost impassable barrier of forest and
mountain. These two colonies were founded, the first in 1605 and
the second in 1608, almost at the same moment as the first English
settlement on the American continent. They had a hard struggle
during the first fifty years of their existence; for the number of
settlers was very small, the soil was barren, the climate severe,
and the Red Indians, especially the ferocious Iroquois towards the
south, were far more formidable enemies than those who bordered on
the English colonies.

There is no part of the history of European colonisation more full

of romance and of heroism than the early history of French Canada;
an incomparable atmosphere of gallantry and devotion seems to
overhang it. From the first, despite their small numbers and their
difficulties, these settlers showed a daring in exploration which
was only equalled by the Spaniards, and to which there is no
parallel in the records of the English colonies. At the very
outset the great explorer Champlain mapped out the greater part of
the Great Lakes, and thus reached farther into the continent than
any Englishman before the end of the eighteenth century; and
although this is partly explained by the fact that the St.
Lawrence and the lakes afforded an easy approach to the interior,
while farther south the forest-clad ranges of the Alleghanies
constituted a very serious barrier, this does not diminish the
French pre-eminence in exploration. Nor can anything in the
history of European colonisation surpass the heroism of the French
missionaries among the Indians, who faced and endured incredible
tortures in order to bring Christianity to the barbarians. No
serious missionary enterprise was ever undertaken by the English
colonists; this difference was in part due to the fact that the
missionary aim was definitely encouraged by the home government in
France. From the outset, then, poverty, paucity of numbers,
gallantry, and missionary zeal formed marked features of the
French North American colonies.

In other respects they very clearly reproduced some of the

features of the motherland. Their organisation was strictly feudal
in character. The real unit of settlement and government was the
seigneurie, an estate owned by a Frenchman of birth, and
cultivated by his vassals, who found refuge from an Indian raid,
or other danger, in the stockaded house which took the place of a
chateau, much as their remote ancestors had taken refuge from the
raids of the Northmen in the castles of their seigneur's
ancestors. And over this feudal society was set, as in France, a
highly centralised government wielding despotic power, and in its
turn absolutely subject to the mandate of the Crown at home. This
despotic government had the right to require the services of all
its subjects in case of need; and it was only the centralised
government of the colony, and the warlike and adventurous
character of its small feudalised society, which enabled it to
hold its own for so long against the superior numbers but laxer
organisation of its English neighbours. A despotic central power,
a feudal organisation, and an entire dependence upon the will of
the King of France and upon his support, form, therefore, the
second group of characteristics which marked the French colonies.
They were colonies in the strictest sense, all the more because
they reproduced the main features of the home system.

Nothing could have differed more profoundly from this system than
the methods which the English were contemporaneously applying,
without plan or clearly defined aim, and guided only by immediate
practical needs, and by the rooted traditions of a self-governing
people. Their enterprises received from the home government little
direct assistance, but they throve better without it; and if there
was little assistance, there was also little interference. In the
East the English East India Company had to yield to the Dutch the
monopoly of the Malayan trade, and bitterly complained of the lack
of government support; but it succeeded in establishing several
modest factories on the coast of India, and was on the whole
prosperous. But it was in the West that the distinctive work of
the English was achieved during this period, by the establishment
of a series of colonies unlike any other European settlements
which had yet been instituted. Their distinctive feature was self-
government, to which they owed their steadily increasing
prosperity. No other European colonies were thus managed on the
principle of autonomy. Indeed, these English settlements were in
1650 the only self-governing lands in the world, apart from
England herself, the United Provinces, and Switzerland.

The first English colony, Virginia, was planted in 1608 by a

trading company organised for the purpose, whose subscribers
included nearly all the London City Companies, and about seven
hundred private individuals of all ranks. Their motives were
partly political ('to put a bit in the ancient enemy's (Spain's)
mouth'), and partly commercial, for they hoped to find gold, and
to render England independent of the marine supplies which came
from the Baltic. But profit was not their sole aim; they were
moved also by the desire to plant a new England beyond the seas.
They made, in fact, no profits; but they did create a branch of
the English stock, and the young squires' and yeomen's sons who
formed the backbone of the colony showed themselves to be
Englishmen by their unwillingness to submit to an uncontrolled
direction of their affairs. In 1619, acting on instructions
received from England, the company's governor summoned an assembly
of representatives, one from each township, to consult on the
needs of the colony. This was the first representative body that
had ever existed outside Europe, and it indicated what was to be
the character of English colonisation. Henceforth the normal
English method of governing a colony was through a governor and an
executive council appointed by the Crown or its delegate, and a
representative assembly, which wielded full control over local
legislation and taxation. 'Our present happiness,' said the
Virginian Assembly in 1640, 'is exemplified by the freedom of
annual assemblies and by legal trials by juries in all civil and
criminal causes.'

The second group of English colonies, those of New England, far to

the north of Virginia, reproduced in an intensified form this note
of self-government. Founded in the years following 1620, these
settlements were the outcome of Puritan discontents in England.
The commercial motive was altogether subsidiary in their
establishment; they existed in order that the doctrine and
discipline of Puritanism might find a home where its ascendancy
would be secure. It was indeed under the guise of a commercial
company that the chief of these settlements was made, but the
company was organised as a means of safe-guarding the colonists
from Crown interference, and at an early date its headquarters
were transferred to New England itself. Far from desiring to
restrict this freedom, the Crown up to a point encouraged it.
Winthrop, one of the leading colonists, tells us that he had
learnt from members of the Privy Council 'that his Majesty did not
intend to impose the ceremonies of the Church of England upon us;
for that it was considered that it was the freedom from such
things that made people come over to us.' The contrast between
this licence and the rigid orthodoxy enforced upon French Canada
or Spanish America is very instructive. It meant that the New
World, so far as it was controlled by England, was to be open as a
place of refuge for those who disliked the restrictions thought
necessary at home. The same note is to be found in the colony of
Maryland, planted by the Roman Catholic Lord Baltimore in 1632,
largely as a place of refuge for his co-religionists. He was
encouraged by the government of Charles I. in this idea, and the
second Lord Baltimore reports that his father 'had absolute
liberty to carry over any from his Majesty's Dominions willing to
go. But he found very few but such as ... could not conform to the
laws of England relating to religion. These declared themselves
willing to plant in this province, if they might have a general
toleration settled by law.' Maryland, therefore, became the first
place in the world of Western civilisation in which full religious
toleration was allowed; for the aim of the New Englanders was not
religious freedom, but a free field for the rigid enforcement of
their own shade of orthodoxy.

Thus, in these first English settlements, the deliberate

encouragement of varieties of type was from the outset a
distinguishing note, and the home authorities neither desired nor
attempted to impose a strict uniformity with the rules and methods
existing in England. There was as great a variety in social and
economic organisation as in religious beliefs between the
aristocratic planter colonies of the south and the democratic
agricultural settlements of New England. In one thing only was
there uniformity: every settlement possessed self-governing
institutions, and prized them beyond all other privileges. None,
indeed, carried self-government to so great an extent as the New
Englanders. They came out organised as religious congregations, in
which every member possessed equal rights, and they took the
congregational system as the basis of their local government, and
church membership as the test of citizenship; nor did any other
colonies attain the right, long exercised by the New Englanders,
of electing their own governors. But there was no English
settlement, not even the little slave-worked plantations in the
West Indian islands, like Barbados, which did not set up, as a
matter of course, a representative body to deal with problems of
legislation and taxation, and the home government never dreamt of
interfering with this practice. Already in 1650, the English
empire was sharply differentiated from the Spanish, the Dutch, and
the French empires by the fact that it consisted of a scattered
group of self-governing communities, varying widely in type, but
united especially by the common possession of free institutions,
and thriving very largely because these institutions enabled local
needs to be duly considered and attracted settlers of many types.

(b) The Period of Systematic Colonial Policy, 1660-1713

The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of

systematic imperial policy on the part of both England and France;
for both countries now realised that in the profitable field of
commerce, at any rate, the Dutch had won a great advantage over
them.

France, after many internal troubles and many foreign wars, had at
last achieved, under the government of Louis XIV., the boon of
firmly established order. She was now beyond all rivalry the
greatest of the European states, and her king and his great
finance minister, Colbert, resolved to win for her also supremacy
in trade and colonisation. But this was to be done absolutely
under the control and direction of the central government. Until
the establishment of the German Empire, there has never been so
marked an instance of the centralised organisation of the whole
national activity as France presented in this period. The French
East India Company was revived under government direction, and
began for the first time to be a serious competitor for Indian
trade. An attempt was made to conquer Madagascar as a useful base
for Eastern enterprises. The sugar industry in the French West
Indian islands was scientifically encouraged and developed, though
the full results of this work were not apparent until the next
century. France began to take an active share in the West African
trade in slaves and other commodities. In Canada a new era of
prosperity began; the population was rapidly increased by the
dispatch of carefully selected parties of emigrants, and the
French activity in missionary work and in exploration became
bolder than ever. Pere Marquette and the Sieur de la Salle traced
out the courses of the Ohio and the Mississippi; French trading-
stations began to arise among the scattered Indian tribes who
alone occupied the vast central plain; and a strong French claim
was established to the possession of this vital area, which was
not only the most valuable part of the American continent, but
would have shut off the English coastal settlements from any
possibility of westward expansion. These remarkable explorations
led, in 1717, to the foundation of New Orleans at the mouth of the
great river, and the organisation of the colony of Louisiana. But
the whole of the intense and systematic imperial activity of the
French during this period depended upon the support and direction
of government; and when Colbert died in 1683, and soon afterwards
all the resources of France were strained by the pressure of two
great European wars, the rapid development which Colbert's zeal
had brought about was checked for a generation. Centralised
administration may produce remarkable immediate results, but it
does not encourage natural and steady growth. Meanwhile the
English had awakened to the fact that England had, almost by a
series of accidents, become the centre of an empire, and to the
necessity of giving to this empire some sort of systematic
organisation. It was the statesmen of the Commonwealth who first
began to grope after an imperial system. The aspect of the
situation which most impressed them was that the enterprising
Dutch were reaping most of the trading profits which arose from
the creation of the English colonies: it was said that ten Dutch
ships called at Barbados for every English ship. To deal with this
they passed the Navigation Act of 1651, which provided that the
trade of England and the colonies should be carried only in
English or colonial ships. They thus gave a logical expression to
the policy of imperial trade monopoly which had been in the minds
of those who were interested in colonial questions from the
outset; and they also opened a period of acute trade rivalry and
war with the Dutch. The first of the Dutch wars, which was waged
by the Commonwealth, was a very even struggle, but it secured the
success of the Navigation Act. Cromwell, though he hastened to
make peace with the Dutch, was a still stronger imperialist than
his parliamentary predecessors; he may justly be described as the
first of the Jingoes. He demanded compensation from the Dutch for
the half-forgotten outrage of Amboyna in 1623. He made a quite
unprovoked attack upon the Spanish island of Hispaniola, and
though he failed to conquer it, gained a compensation in the
seizure of Jamaica (1655). And he insisted upon the obedience of
the colonies to the home government with a severity never earlier
shown. With him imperial aims may be said to have become, for the
first time, one of the ruling ends of the English government.

But it was the reign of Charles II. which saw the definite
organisation of a clearly conceived imperial policy; in the
history of English imperialism there are few periods more
important. The chief statesmen and courtiers of the reign, Prince
Rupert, Clarendon, Shaftesbury, Albemarle, were all enthusiasts
for the imperial idea. They had a special committee of the Privy
Council for Trade and Plantations, [Footnote: It was not till
1696, however, that this Board became permanent.] and appointed
John Locke, the ablest political thinker of the age, to be its
secretary. They pushed home the struggle against the maritime
ascendancy of the Dutch, and fought two Dutch wars; and though the
history-books, influenced by the Whig prejudice against Charles
II., always treat these wars as humiliating and disgraceful, while
they treat the Dutch war of the Commonwealth as just and glorious,
the plain fact is that the first Dutch war of Charles II. led to
the conquest of the Dutch North American colony of the New
Netherlands (1667), and so bridged the gap between the New England
and the southern colonies. They engaged in systematic
colonisation, founding the new colony of Carolina to the south of
Virginia, while out of their Dutch conquests they organised the
colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware; and the end of the
reign saw the establishment of the interesting and admirably
managed Quaker colony of Pennsylvania. They started the Hudson Bay
Company, which engaged in the trade in furs to the north of the
French colonies. They systematically encouraged the East India
Company, which now began to be more prosperous than at any earlier
period, and obtained in Bombay its first territorial possession in
India.

More important, they worked out a new colonial policy, which was
to remain, in its main features, the accepted British policy down
to the loss of the American colonies in 1782. The theory at the
base of this policy was that while the mother-country must be
responsible for the defence of all the scattered settlements,
which in their weakness were exposed to attack from many sides, in
she might reasonably expect to be put in possession of definite
trade advantages. Hence the Navigation Act of 1660 provided not
only that inter-imperial trade should be carried in English or
colonial vessels, but that certain 'enumerated articles,'
including some of the most important colonial products, should be
sent only to England, so that English merchants should have the
profits of selling them to other countries, and the English
government the proceeds of duties upon them; and another Act
provided that imports to the colonies should only come from, or
through, England. In other words, England was to be the commercial
entrepot of the whole empire; and the regulation of imperial trade
as a whole was to belong to the English government and parliament.
To the English government also must necessarily fall the conduct
of the relations of the empire as a whole with other powers. This
commercial system was not, however, purely one-sided. If the
colonies were to send their chief products only to England, they
were at the same time to have a monopoly, or a marked advantage,
in English markets. Tobacco-growing had been for a time a
promising industry in England; it was prohibited in order that it
might not compete with the colonial product; and differential
duties were levied on the competing products of other countries
and their colonies. In short, the new policy was one of Imperial
Preference; it aimed at turning the empire into an economic unit,
of which England should be the administrative and distributing
centre. So far the English policy did not differ in kind from the
contemporary colonial policy of other countries, though it left to
the colonies a greater freedom of trade (for example, in the 'non-
enumerated articles') than was ever allowed by Spain or France, or
by the two great trading companies which controlled the foreign
possessions of Holland.

But there is one respect in which the authors of this system

differed very widely from the colonial statesmen of other
countries. Though they were anxious to organise and consolidate
the empire on the basis of a trade system, they had no desire or
intention of altering its self-governing character, or of
discouraging the growth of a healthy diversity of type and method.
Every one of the new colonies of this period was provided with the
accustomed machinery of representative government: in the case of
Carolina, the philosopher, John Locke, was invited to draw up a
model constitution, and although his scheme was quite unworkable,
the fact that he was asked to make it affords a striking proof of
the seriousness with which the problems of colonial government
were regarded. In several of the West Indian settlements self-
governing institutions were organised during these years. In the
Frame of Government which Penn set forth on the foundation of
Pennsylvania, in 1682, he laid it down that 'any government is
free where the laws rule, and where the people are a party to
these rules,' and on this basis proceeded to organise his system.
According to this definition all the English colonies were free,
and they were almost the only free communities in the world. And
though it is true that there was an almost unceasing conflict
between the government and the New England colonies, no one who
studies the story of these quarrels can fail to see that the
demands of the New Englanders were often unreasonable and
inconsistent with the maintenance of imperial unity, while the
home government was extremely patient and moderate. Above all,
almost the most marked feature of the colonial policy of Charles
II. was the uniform insistence upon complete religious toleration
in the colonies. Every new charter contained a clause securing
this vital condition.

It has long been our habit to condemn the old colonial system as
it was defined in this period, and to attribute to it the
disruption of the empire in the eighteenth century. But the
judgment is not a fair one; it is due to those Whig prejudices by
which so much of the modern history of England has been distorted.
The colonial policy of Shaftesbury and his colleagues was
incomparably more enlightened than that of any contemporary
government. It was an interesting experiment--the first, perhaps,
in modern history--in the reconciliation of unity and freedom.
And it was undeniably successful: under it the English colonies
grew and throve in a very striking way. Everything, indeed, goes
to show that this system was well designed for the needs of a
group of colonies which were still in a state of weakness, still
gravely under-peopled and undeveloped. Evil results only began to
show themselves in the next age, when the colonies were growing
stronger and more independent, and when the self-complacent Whigs,
instead of revising the system to meet new conditions, actually
enlarged and emphasised its most objectionable features.

(c) The, Conflict of French and English, 1713-1763

While France and England were defining and developing their

sharply contrasted imperial systems, the Dutch had fallen into the
background, content with the rich dominion which they had already
acquired; and the Spanish and Portuguese empires had both fallen
into stagnation. New competitors, indeed, now began to press into
the field: the wildly exaggerated notions of the wealth to be made
from colonial ventures which led to the frenzied speculations of
the early eighteenth century, John Law's schemes, and the South
Sea Bubble, induced other powers to try to obtain a share of this
wealth; and Austria, Brandenburg, and Denmark made fitful
endeavours to become colonising powers. But the enterprises of
these states were never of serious importance. The future of the
non-European world seemed to depend mainly upon France and
England; and it was yet to be determined which of the two systems,
centralised autocracy enforcing uniformity, or self-government
encouraging variety of type, would prove the more successful and
would play the greater part. Two bodies of ideas so sharply
contrasted were bound to come into conflict. In the two great wars
between England and Louis XIV. (1688-1713), though the questions
at issue were primarily European, the conflict inevitably spread
to the colonial field; and in the result France was forced to cede
in 1713 the province of Acadia (which had twice before been in
English hands), the vast basin of Hudson's Bay, and the island of
Newfoundland, to which the fishermen of both nations had resorted,
though the English had always claimed it. But these were only
preliminaries, and the main conflict was fought out during the
half-century following the Peace of Utrecht, 1713-63.

During this half-century Britain was under the rule of the Whig
oligarchy, which had no clearly conceived ideas on imperial
policy. Under the influence of the mercantile class the Whigs
increased the severity of the restrictions on colonial trade, and
prohibited the rise of industries likely to compete with those of
the mother-country. But under the influence of laziness and
timidity, and of the desire quieta non movere, they made no
attempt seriously to enforce either the new or the old
restrictions, and in these circumstances smuggling trade between
the New England colonies and the French West Indies, in defiance
of the Navigation Act and its companions, grew to such dimensions
that any serious interference with it would be felt as a real
grievance. The Whigs and their friends later took credit for their
neglect. George Grenville, they said, lost the colonies because he
read the American dispatches; he would have done much better to
leave the dispatches and the colonies alone. But this is a damning
apology. If the old colonial system, whose severity, on paper, the
Whigs had greatly increased, was no longer workable, it should
have been revised; but no Whig showed any sign of a sense that
change was necessary. Yet the prevalence of smuggling was not the
only proof of the need for change. There was during the period a
long succession of disputes between colonial governors and their
assemblies, which showed that the restrictions upon their
political freedom, as well as those upon their economic freedom,
were beginning to irk the colonists; and that self-government was
following its universal and inevitable course, and demanding its
own fulfilment. But the Whigs made no sort of attempt to consider
the question whether the self-government of the colonies could be
increased without impairing the unity of the empire. The single
device of their statesmanship was--not to read the dispatches.
And, in the meanwhile, no evil results followed, because the
loyalty of the colonists was ensured by the imminence of the
French danger. The mother-country was still responsible for the
provision of defence, though she was largely cheated of the
commercial advantages which were to have been its recompense.

After 1713 there was a comparatively long interval of peace

between Britain and France, but it was occupied by an acute
commercial rivalry, in which, on the whole, the French seemed to
be getting the upper hand. Their sugar islands in the West Indies
were more productive than the British; their traders were rapidly
increasing their hold over the central plain of North America, to
the alarm of the British colonists; their intrigues kept alive a
perpetual unrest in the recently conquered province of Acadia; and
away in India, under the spirited direction of Franois Dupleix,
their East India Company became a more formidable competitor for
the Indian trade than it had hitherto been. Hence the imperial
problem presented itself to the statesmen of that generation as a
problem of power rather than as a problem of organisation; and the
intense rivalry with France dwarfed and obscured the need for a
reconsideration of colonial relations. At length this rivalry
flamed out into two wars. The first of these was fought, on both
sides, in a strangely half-hearted and lackadaisical way. But in
the second (the Seven Years' War, 1756-63) the British cause,
after two years of disaster, fell under the confident and daring
leadership of Pitt, which brought a series of unexampled
successes. The French flag was almost swept from the seas. The
French settlements in Canada were overrun and conquered. With the
fall of Quebec it was determined that the system of self-
government, and not that of autocracy, should control the
destinies of the North American continent; and Britain emerged in
1763 the supreme colonial power of the world. The problem of power
had been settled in her favour; but the problem of organisation
remained unsolved. It emerged in an acute and menacing form as
soon as the war was over.

During the course of these two wars, and in the interval between
them, an extraordinary series of events had opened a new scene for
the rivalry of the two great imperial powers, and a new world
began to be exposed to the influence of the political ideas of
Europe. The vast and populous land of India, where the Europeans
had hitherto been content to play the part of modest traders,
under the protection and control of great native rulers, had
suddenly been displayed as a field for the imperial ambitions of
the European peoples. Ever since the first appearance of the
Dutch, the English, and the French in these regions, Northern
India had formed a consolidated empire ruled from Delhi by the
great Mogul dynasty; the shadow of its power was also cast over
the lesser princes of Southern India. But after 1709, and still
more after 1739, the Mogul Empire collapsed, and the whole of
India, north and south, rapidly fell into a condition of complete
anarchy. A multitude of petty rulers, nominal satraps of the
powerless Mogul, roving adventurers, or bands of Mahratta raiders,
put an end to all order and security; and to protect themselves
and maintain their trade the European traders must needs enlist
considerable bodies of Indian troops. It had long been proved that
a comparatively small number of troops, disciplined in the
European fashion, could hold their own against the loose and
disorderly mobs who followed the standards of Indian rulers. And
it now occurred to the ambitious mind of the Frenchman Dupleix
that it should be possible, by the use of this military
superiority, to intervene with effect in the unceasing strife of
the Indian princes, to turn the scale on one side or the other,
and to obtain over the princes whose cause he embraced a
commanding influence, which would enable him to secure the
expulsion of his English rivals, and the establishment of a French
trade monopoly based upon political influence.

This daring project was at first triumphantly successful. The

English had to follow suit in self-defence, but could not equal
the ability of Dupleix. In 1750 a French protege occupied the most
important throne of Southern India at Hyderabad, and was protected
and kept loyal by a force of French sepoys under the Marquis de
Bussy, whose expenses were met out of the revenues of large
provinces (the Northern Sarkars) placed under French
administration; while in the Carnatic, the coastal region where
all the European traders had their south-eastern headquarters, a
second French protege had almost succeeded in crushing his rival,
whom the English company supported. But the genius of Clive
reversed the situation with dramatic swiftness; the French
authorities at home, alarmed at these dangerous adventures,
repudiated and recalled Dupleix (1754), and the British power was
left to apply the methods which he had invented. When the Seven
Years' War broke out (1756), the French, repenting of their
earlier decision, sent a substantial force to restore their lost
influence in the Carnatic, but the result was complete failure. A
British protege henceforward ruled in the Carnatic; a British
force replaced the French at Hyderabad; and the revenues of the
Northern Sarkars, formerly assigned for the maintenance of the
French force, were handed over to its successor. Meanwhile in the
rich province of Bengal a still more dramatic revolution had taken
place. Attacked by the young Nawab, Siraj-uddaula, the British
traders at Calcutta had been forced to evacuate that prosperous
centre (1756). But Clive, coming up with a fleet and an army from
Madras, applied the lessons he had learnt in the Carnatic, set up
a rival claimant to the throne of Bengal, and at Plassey (1757)
won for his puppet a complete victory. From 1757 onwards the
British East India Company was the real master in Bengal, even
more completely than in the Carnatic. It had not, in either
region, conquered any territory; it had only supported
successfully a claimant to the native throne. The native
government, in theory, continued as before; the company, in
theory, was its subject and vassal. But in practice these great
and rich provinces lay at its mercy, and if it did not yet choose
to undertake their government, this was only because it preferred
to devote itself to its original business of trade.

Thus by 1763 the British power had achieved a dazzling double

triumph. It had destroyed the power of its chief rival both in the
East and in the West. It had established the supremacy of the
British peoples and of British methods of government throughout
the whole continent of North America; and it had entered, blindly
and without any conception of what the future was to bring forth,
upon the path which was to lead to dominion over the vast
continent of India, and upon the tremendous task of grafting the
ideas of the West upon the East.

Such was the outcome of the first two periods in the history of
European imperialism. It left Central and South America under the
stagnant and reactionary government of Spain and Portugal; the
eastern coast of North America under the control of groups of
self-governing Englishmen; Canada, still inhabited by Frenchmen,
under British dominance; Java and the Spice Islands, together with
the small settlement of Cape Colony, in the hands of the Dutch; a
medley of European settlements in the West Indian islands, and a
string of European factories along the coast of West Africa; and
the beginning of an anomalous British dominion established at two
points on the coast of India. But of all the European nations
which had taken part in this vast process of expansion, one alone,
the British, still retained its vitality and its expansive power.

IV

THE ERA OF REVOLUTION, 1763-1825

'Colonies are like fruits,' said Turgot, the eighteenth-century

French economist and statesman: 'they cling to the mother-tree
only until they are ripe.' This generalisation, which represented
a view very widely held during that and the next age, seemed to be
borne out in the most conclusive way by the events of the sixty
years following the Seven Years' War. In 1763 the French had lost
almost the whole of the empire which they had toilsomely built up
during a century and a half. Within twenty years their triumphant
British rivals were forced to recognise the independence of the
American colonies, and thus lost the bulk of what may be called
the first British Empire. They still retained the recently
conquered province of French Canada, but it seemed unlikely that
the French Canadians would long be content to live under an alien
dominion: if they had not joined in the American Revolution, it
was not because they loved the British, but because they hated the
Americans. The French Revolutionary wars brought further changes.
One result of these wars was that the Dutch lost Cape Colony,
Ceylon, and Java, though Java was restored to them in 1815. A
second result was that when Napoleon made himself master of Spain
in 1808, the Spanish colonies in Central and South America ceased
to be governed from the mother-country; and having tasted the
sweets of independence, and still more, the advantages of
unrestricted trade, could never again be brought into
subordination. By 1825 nothing was left of the vast Spanish Empire
save the Canaries, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands;
nothing was left of the Portuguese Empire save a few decaying
posts on the coasts of Africa and India; nothing was left of the
Dutch Empire save Java and its dependencies, restored in 1815;
nothing was left of the French Empire save a few West Indian
islands; and what had been the British American colonies were now
the United States, a great power declaring to Europe, through the
mouth of President Monroe, that she would resist any attempt of
the European powers to restore the old regime in South America. It
appeared that the political control of European states over non-
European regions must be short-lived and full of trouble; and that
the influence of Europe upon the non-European world would
henceforth be exercised mainly through new independent states
imbued with European ideas. Imperial aspirations thus seemed to
that and the next generation at once futile and costly.

Of all these colonial revolutions the most striking was that which
tore away the American colonies from Britain (1764-82); not only
because it led to the creation of one of the great powers of the
world, and was to afford the single instance which has yet arisen
of a daughter-nation outnumbering its mother-country, but still
more because it seemed to prove that not even the grant of
extensive powers of self-government would secure the permanent
loyalty of colonies. Indeed, from the standpoint of Realpolitik,
it might be argued that in the case of America self-government was
shown to be a dangerous gift; for the American colonies, which
alone among European settlements had obtained this supreme
endowment, were the first, and indeed the only, European
settlements to throw off deliberately their connection with the
mother-country. France and Holland lost their colonies by war, and
even the Spanish colonies would probably never have thought of
severing their relations with Spain but for the anomalous
conditions created by the Napoleonic conquest.

The American Revolution is, then, an event unique at once in its

causes, its character, and its consequences; and it throws a most
important illumination upon some of the problems of imperialism.
It cannot be pretended that the revolt of the colonists was due to
oppression or to serious misgovernment. The paltry taxes which
were its immediate provoking cause would have formed a quite
negligible burden upon a very prosperous population; they were to
have been spent exclusively within the colonies themselves, and
would have been mainly used to meet a part of the cost of colonial
defence, the bulk of which was still to be borne by the mother-
country. If the colonists had been willing to suggest any other
means of raising the required funds, their suggestions would have
been readily accepted. This was made plain at several stages in
the course of the discussion, but the invitation to suggest
alternative methods of raising money met with no response. The
plain fact is that Britain, already heavily loaded with debt, was
bearing practically the whole burden of colonial defence, and was
much less able than the colonies themselves to endure the strain.
As for the long-established restrictions on colonial trade, which
in fact though not in form contributed as largely as the proposals
of direct taxation to cause the revolt, they were far less severe,
even if they had been strictly enforced, than the restrictions
imposed upon the trade of other European settlements.

It is equally misleading to attribute the blame of the revolt

wholly to George III. and the ministers by whom he was served
during the critical years. No doubt it is possible to imagine a
more tactful man than George Grenville, a more far-seeing and
courageous statesman than Lord North, a less obstinate prince than
George III. himself. But it may be doubted whether any change of
men would have done more than postpone the inevitable. The great
Whig apologists who have dictated the accepted view of British
history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have laboured
to create the impression that if only Burke, Chatham, and Charles
Fox had had the handling of the issue, the tragedy of disruption
would have been avoided. But there is no evidence that any of
these men, except perhaps Burke, appreciated the magnitude and
difficulty of the questions that had been inevitably raised in
1764, and must have been raised whoever had been in power; or that
they would have been able to suggest a workable new scheme of
colonial government which would have met the difficulty. If they
had put forward such a scheme, it would have been wrecked on the
resistance of British opinion, which was still dominated by the
theories and traditions of the old colonial system; and even if it
had overcome this obstacle, it would very likely have been ruined
by the captious and litigious spirit to which events had given
birth among the colonists, especially in New England.

The root of the matter was that the old colonial system, which had
suited well enough the needs of the colonies as they were when it
was devised by the statesmen of Charles II.'s reign, was no longer
suitable to their condition now that they had become great and
prosperous communities of freemen. They enjoyed self-government on
a scale more generous than any other communities in the world
outside of Britain; indeed, in one sense they enjoyed it on a more
generous scale than Britain herself, since political rights were
much more widely exercised in the colonies, owing to the natural
conditions of a new and prosperous land, than they were to be, or
could be, in Britain until nearly a century later. No direct
taxation had as yet been imposed upon them without their own
consent. They made the laws by which their own lives were
regulated. They were called upon to pay no tribute to the home
government, except the very indirect levy on goods passing through
England to or from their ports, and this was nearly balanced by
the advantages which they enjoyed in the British market, and far
more than balanced by the protection afforded to them by the
British fleet. They were not even required to raise troops for the
defence of their own frontiers except of their own free will, and
the main burden of defending even their landward frontier was
borne by the mother-country. But being British they had the
instinct of self-government in their blood and bones, and they
found that the control of their own affairs was qualified or
limited in two principal ways.

In the first place, the executive and judicial officers who

carried out the laws were not appointed by them but by the Crown
in England: the colonies were not responsible for the
administration of their own laws. In the second place, the
regulations by which their foreign trade was governed were
determined, not by themselves, but by the British parliament: they
were not responsible for the control of their own traffic with the
outside world. It is true that the salaries of the executive
officials and the judges depended upon their grant, and that any
governor who acted in the teeth of colonial opinion would find his
position quite untenable, so that the colonists exercised a real
if indirect control over administration. It is true also that they
accepted the general principles of the commercial system, and had
reaped great benefits from it.

But it is the unfailing instinct of the citizens in a self-

governing community to be dissatisfied unless they feel that they
have a full and equal share in the control of their own destinies.
Denied responsibility, they are apt to become irresponsible; and
when all allowance has been made for the stupidities of governors
and for the mistakes of the home authorities, it must be
recognised that the thirteen American colonial legislatures often
behaved in a very irresponsible way, and were extremely difficult
to handle. They refused to vote fixed salaries to their judges in
order to make their power felt, simply because the judges were
appointed by the Crown, although in doing so they were dangerously
undermining judicial independence. They refused in many cases to
supply anything like adequate contingents for the war against the
French and their Indian allies, partly because each legislature
was afraid of being more generous than the others, partly because
they could trust to the home government to make good their
deficiencies. Yet at the same time they did nothing to check, but
rather encouraged, the wholesale smuggling by which the trade
regulations were reduced to a nullity, though these regulations
were not only accepted in principle by themselves, but afforded
the only compensation to the mother-country for the cost of
colonial defence. It is as unscientific to blame the colonists and
their legislatures for this kind of action, as it is to blame the
British statesmen for their proposals. It was the almost
inevitable result of the conditions among a free, prosperous, and
extremely self-confident people; it was, indeed, the proof that in
this young people the greatest political ideal of western
civilisation, the ideal of self-government, had taken firm root.
The denial of responsibility was producing irresponsibility; and
even if the Stamp Act and the Tea Duties had never been proposed,
this state of things was bound to lead to increasing friction. Nor
must it be forgotten that this friction was accentuated by the
contrast between the democratic conditions of colonial life, and
the aristocratic organisation of English society.

It ought to have been obvious, long before Grenville initiated his

new policy in 1764, that the colonial system was not working well;
and the one circumstance which had prevented serious conflict was
the danger which threatened the colonists in the aggressive
attitude of the French to the north and west. Since the individual
colonies refused to raise adequate forces for their own defence,
or to co-operate with one another in a common scheme, they were
dependent for their security upon the mother-country. But as soon
as the danger was removed, as it was in 1763, this reason for
restraint vanished; and although the great majority of the
colonists were quite sincerely desirous of retaining their
membership of the British commonwealth, the conditions would
inevitably have produced a state of intensifying friction, unless
the whole colonial system had been drastically reconstructed.

Reconstruction was therefore inevitable in 1764. The Whig policy

of simply ignoring the issue and 'not reading the dispatches'
could no longer be pursued; it was indeed largely responsible for
the mischief. George III. and Grenville deserve the credit of
seeing this. But their scheme of reconstruction not unnaturally
amounted to little more than a tightening-up of the old system.
The trade laws were to be more strictly enforced. The governors
and the judges were to be made more independent of the assemblies
by being given fixed salaries. The colonists were to bear a larger
share of the cost of defence, which fell so unfairly on the
mother-country. If the necessary funds could be raised by means
approved by the colonists themselves, well and good; but if not,
then they must be raised by the authority of the imperial
parliament. For the existing system manifestly could not continue
indefinitely, and it was better to have the issue clearly raised,
even at the risk of conflict, than to go on merely drifting.

When the colonists (without suggesting any alternative proposals)

contented themselves with repudiating the right of parliament to
tax them, and proceeded to outrageous insults to the king's
authority, and the most open defiance of the trade regulations,
indignation grew in Britain. It seemed, to the average Englishman,
that the colonists proposed to leave every public burden, even the
cost of judges' salaries, on the shoulders of the mother-country,
already loaded with a debt which had been largely incurred in
defence of the colonies; but to disregard every obligation imposed
upon themselves. A system whereunder the colony has all rights and
no enforcible duties, the mother-country all duties and no
enforcible rights, obviously could not work. That was the system
which, in the view of the gentlemen of England, the colonists were
bent upon establishing; and, taking this view, they cannot be
blamed for refusing to accept such a conclusion. There was no one,
either in Britain or in America, capable of grasping the
essentials of the problem, which were that, once established,
self-government inevitably strives after its own fulfilment; that
these British settlers, in whom the British tradition of self-
government had been strengthened by the freedom of a new land,
would never be content until they enjoyed a full share in the
control of their own affairs; and that although they seemed, even
to themselves, to be fighting about legal minutiae, about the
difference between internal and external duties, about the
legality of writs of assistance, and so forth, the real issue was
the deeper one of the fulfilment of self-government. Could fully
responsible self-government be reconciled with imperial unity?
Could any means be devised whereby the units in a fellowship of
free states might retain full control over their own affairs, and
at the same time effectively combine for common purposes? That was
and is the ultimate problem of British imperial organisation, as
it was and is the ultimate problem of international relations. But
the problem, though it now presented itself in a comparatively
simple form, was never fairly faced on either side of the
Atlantic. For the mother and her daughters too quickly reached the
point of arguing about their legal rights against one another, and
when friends begin to argue about their legal rights, the breach
of their friendship is at hand. So the dreary argument, which
lasted for eleven years (1764-75), led to the still more dreary
war, which lasted for seven years (1775-82); and the only family
of free self-governing communities existing in the world was
broken up in bitterness. This was indeed a tragedy. For if the
great partnership of freedom could have been reorganised on
conditions that would have enabled it to hold together, the cause
of liberty in the world would have been made infinitely more
secure.

The Revolution gave to the Americans the glory of establishing the

first fully democratic system of government on a national scale
that had yet existed in the world, and of demonstrating that by
the machinery of self-government a number of distinct and jealous
communities could be united for common purposes. The new American
Commonwealth became an inspiration for eager Liberals in the old
world as well as in the new, and its successful establishment
formed the strongest of arguments for the democratic idea in all
lands. Unhappily the pride of this great achievement helped to
persuade the Americans that they were different from the rest of
the world, and unaffected by its fortunes. They were apt to think
of themselves as the inventors and monopolists of political
liberty. Cut off by a vast stretch of ocean from the Old World,
and having lost that contact with its affairs which the relation
with Britain had hitherto maintained, they followed but dimly, and
without much comprehension, the obscure and complex struggles
wherein the spirit of liberty was working out a new Europe, in the
face of difficulties vastly greater than any with which the
Americans had ever had to contend. They had been alienated from
Britain, the one great free state of Europe, and had been
persuaded by their reading of their own experience that she was a
tyrant-power; and they thus found it hard to recognise her for
what, with all her faults, she genuinely was--the mother of free
institutions in the modern world, the founder and shaper of their
own prized liberties. All these things combined to persuade the
great new republic that she not only might, but ought to, stand
aloof from the political problems of the rest of the world, and
take no interest in its concerns. This attitude, the natural
product of the conditions, was to last for more than a century,
and was to weaken greatly the cause of liberty in the world.

Although the most obvious features of the half-century following

the great British triumph of 1763 were the revolt of the American
colonies and the apparently universal collapse of the imperialist
ambitions of the European nations, a more deeply impressive
feature of the period was that, in spite of the tragedy and
humiliation of the great disruption, the imperial impetus
continued to work potently in Britain, alone among the European
nations; and to such effect that at the end of the period she
found herself in control of a new empire more extensive than that
which she had lost, and far more various in its character. Having
failed to solve one great imperial problem, she promptly addressed
herself to a whole series of others even more difficult, and for
these she was to find more hopeful solutions.

When the American revolt began, the Canadian colonies to the north
were in an insecure and unorganised state. On the coast, in Nova
Scotia and Newfoundland, there was a small British population; but
the riverine colony of Canada proper, with its centre at Quebec,
was still purely French, and was ruled by martial law. Accustomed
to a despotic system, and not yet reconciled to the British
supremacy, the French settlers were obviously unready for self-
government. But the Quebec Act of 1774, by securing the
maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion and of French civil
law, ensured the loyalty of the French; and this Act is also
noteworthy as the first formal expression of willingness to admit
or even welcome the existence, within the hospitable limits of the
Empire, of a variety of types of civilisation. In the new British
Empire there was to be no uniformity of Kultur.

The close of the American struggle, however, brought a new

problem. Many thousands of exiles from the revolting colonies,
willing to sacrifice everything in order to retain their British
citizenship, poured over the borders into the Canadian lands. They
settled for the first time the rich province of Ontario, greatly
increased the population of Nova Scotia, and started the
settlement of New Brunswick. To these exiles Britain felt that she
owed much, and, despite her own financial distress, expended large
sums in providing them with the means to make a good beginning in
their new homes. But it was impossible to deny these British
settlers, and the emigrants from Britain who soon began to join
them, the rights of self-government, to which they were
accustomed. Their advent, however, in a hitherto French province,
raised the very difficult problem of racial relationship. They
might have been used as a means for Anglicising the earlier French
settlers and for forcing them into a British mould; it may fairly
be said that most European governments would have used them in
this way, and many of the settlers would willingly have fallen in
with such a programme. But that would have been out of accord with
the genius of the British system, which believes in freedom and
variety. Accordingly, by the Act of 1791, the purely French region
of Quebec or Lower Canada was separated from the British region of
Ontario or Upper Canada, and both districts, as well as the
coastal settlements, were endowed with self-governing institutions
of the familiar pattern--an elected assembly controlling
legislation and taxation, a nominated governor and council
directing the executive. Thus within eighteen years of their
conquest the French colonists were introduced to self-government.
And within nine years of the loss of the American colonies, a new
group of self-governing American colonies had been organised. They
were sufficiently content with the system to resist with vigour
and success an American invasion in 1812. While the American
controversy was proceeding, one of the greatest of British
navigators, Captain Cook, was busy with his remarkable
explorations. He was the first to survey the archipelagoes of the
Pacific; more important, he was the real discoverer of Australia
and New Zealand; for though the Dutch explorers had found these
lands more than a century earlier, they had never troubled to
complete their explorations. Thus a vast new field, eminently
suitable for European settlement, was placed at the disposal of
Britain. It was utilised with extraordinary promptitude. The loss
of the American colonies had deprived Britain of her chief
dumping-ground for convicts. In 1788, six years after the
recognition of their independence, she decided to use the new
continent for this purpose, and the penal settlement of Botany Bay
began (under unfavourable auspices) the colonisation of Australia.

But the most important, and the most amazing, achievement of

Britain in this period was the establishment and extension of her
empire in India, and the planting within it of the first great
gift of Western civilisation, the sovereignty of a just and
impartial law. This was a novel and a very difficult task, such as
no European people had yet undertaken; and it is not surprising
that there should have been a period of bewildered misgovernment
before it was achieved. That it should have been achieved at all
is one of the greatest miracles of European imperialism.

By 1763 the East India Company had established a controlling

influence over the Nawabs of two important regions, Bengal and the
Carnatic, and had shown, in a series of struggles, that its
control was not to be shaken off. But the company had not annexed
any territory, or assumed any responsibility for the government of
these rich provinces. Its agents in the East, who were too far
from London to be effectively controlled, enjoyed power without
responsibility. They were privileged traders, upon whom the native
governments dared not impose restrictions, and (as any body of
average men would have done under similar circumstances) they
gravely abused their position to build up huge fortunes for
themselves. During the fifteen years following the battle of
Plassey (1757) there is no denying that the political power of the
British in India was a mere curse to the native population, and
led to the complete disorganisation of the already decrepit native
system of government in the provinces affected. It was vain for
the directors at home to scold their servants. There were only two
ways out of the difficulty. One was that the company should
abandon India, which was not to be expected. The other was that,
possessing power, of which it was now impossible to strip
themselves, they should assume the responsibility for its
exercise, and create for their subjects a just and efficient
system of government. But the company would not see this. They had
never desired political power, but had drifted into the possession
of it in spite of themselves. They honestly disliked the idea of
establishing by force an alien domination over subject peoples,
and this feeling was yet more strongly held by the most
influential political circles in England. The company desired
nothing but trade. Their business was that of traders, and they
wanted only to be left free to mind their business. So the evils
arising from power without responsibility continued, and half-
hearted attempts to amend them in 1765 and in 1769 only made the
conditions worse. The events of the years from 1757 to 1772 showed
that when the superior organisation of the West came in contact
with the East, mere trading exploitation led to even worse results
than a forcibly imposed dominion; and the only solution lay in the
wise adaptation of western methods of government to eastern
conditions.

Thus Britain found herself faced with an imperial problem of

apparently insuperable difficulty, which reached its most acute
stage just at the time when the American trouble was at its
height. The British parliament and government intervened, and in
1773 for the first time assumed some responsibility for the
affairs of the East India Company. But they did not understand the
Indian problem--how, indeed, should they?--and their first
solution was a failure. By a happy fortune, however, the East
India Company had conferred the governorship of Bengal (1772) upon
the greatest Englishman of the eighteenth century, Warren
Hastings. Hastings pensioned off the Nawab, took over direct
responsibility for the government of Bengal, and organised a
system of justice which, though far from perfect, established for
the first time the Reign of Law in an Indian realm. His firm and
straightforward dealings with the other Indian powers still
further strengthened the position of the company; and when in the
midst of the American war, at a moment when no aid could be
expected from Britain, a combination of the most formidable Indian
powers, backed by a French fleet, threatened the downfall of the
company's authority, Hastings' resourceful and inspiring
leadership was equal to every emergency. He not only brought the
company with heightened prestige out of the war, but throughout
its course no hostile army was ever allowed to cross the frontiers
of Bengal. In the midst of the unceasing and desolating wars of
India, the territories under direct British rule formed an island
of secure peace and of justice. That was Hastings' supreme
contribution: it was the foundation upon which arose the fabric of
the Indian Empire. Hastings was not a great conqueror or annexer
of territory; the only important acquisition made during his
regime was effected, in defiance of his protests, by the hostile
majority which for a time overrode him in his own council, and
which condemned him for ambition. His work was to make the British
rule mean security and justice in place of tyranny; and it was
because it had come to mean this that it grew, after his time,
with extraordinary rapidity.
It was not by the desire of the directors or the home government
that it grew. They did everything in their power to check its
growth, for they shrank from any increase to their
responsibilities. They even prohibited by law all annexations, or
the making of alliances with Indian powers. [Footnote: India Act
of 1784] But fate was too strong for them. Even a governor like
Lord Cornwallis, a convinced supporter of the policy of non-
expansion and non-intervention, found himself forced into war, and
compelled to annex territories; because non-intervention was
interpreted by the Indian powers as a confession of weakness and
an invitation to attack. Non-intervention also gave openings to
the French, who, since the outbreak of the Revolution, had revived
their old Indian ambitions; and while Bonaparte was engaged in the
conquest of Egypt as a half-way house to India (1797), French
agents were busy building up a new combination of Indian powers
against the company.

This formidable coalition was about to come to a head when, in

1798, there landed in India a second man of genius, sent by fate
at the critical moment. In five years, by an amazing series of
swiftly successful wars and brilliantly conceived treaties, the
Marquess Wellesley broke the power of every member of the hostile
coalitions, except two of the Mahratta princes. The area of
British territory was quadrupled; the most important of the Indian
princes became vassals of the company; and the Great Mogul of
Delhi himself, powerless now, but always a symbol of the over-
lordship of India, passed under British protection. When Wellesley
left India in 1805, the East India Company was already the
paramount power in India south-east of the Sutlej and the Indus.
The Mahratta princes, indeed, still retained a restricted
independence, and for an interval the home authorities declined to
permit any interference with them, even though they were
manifestly giving protection to bands of armed raiders who
terrorised and devastated territories which were under British
protection. But the time came when the Mahrattas themselves broke
the peace. Then their power also was broken; and in 1818 Britain
stood forth as the sovereign ruler of India.

This was only sixty years after the battle of Plassey had
established British influence, though not British rule, in a
single province of India; only a little over thirty years after
Warren Hastings returned to England, leaving behind him an empire
still almost limited to that single province. There is nothing in
history that can be compared with the swiftness of this
achievement, which is all the more remarkable when we remember
that almost every step in the advance was taken with extreme
unwillingness. But the most impressive thing about this astounding
fabric of power, which extended over an area equal to half of
Europe and inhabited by perhaps one-sixth of the human race, was
not the swiftness with which it was created, but the results which
flowed from it. It had begun in corruption and oppression, but it
had grown because it had come to stand for justice, order, and
peace. In 1818 it could already be claimed for the British rule in
India that it had brought to the numerous and conflicting races,
religions, and castes of that vast and ancient land, three boons
of the highest value: political unity such as they had never known
before; security from the hitherto unceasing ravages of internal
turbulence and war; and, above all, the supreme gift which the
West had to offer to the East, the substitution of an unvarying
Reign of Law for the capricious wills of innumerable and shifting
despots. This is an achievement unexampled in history, and it
alone justified the imposition of the rule of the West over the
East, which had at first seemed to produce nothing but evil. It
took place during the age of Revolution, when the external empires
of Europe were on all sides falling into ruin; and it passed at
the time almost unregarded, because it was overshadowed by the
drama of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

The construction of the Indian Empire would of itself suffice to

make an age memorable, but it does not end the catalogue of the
achievements of British imperialism in this tremendous period. As
a result of the participation of Holland in the war on the side of
France, the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was occupied by
Britain. It was first occupied in 1798, restored for a brief
period in 1801, reoccupied in 1806, and finally retained under the
treaty settlement of 1815. The Cape was, in fact, the most
important acquisition secured to Britain by that treaty; and it is
worth noting that while the other great powers who had joined in
the final overthrow of Napoleon helped themselves without
hesitation to immense and valuable territories, Britain, which had
alone maintained the struggle from beginning to end without
flagging, actually paid the sum of 2,000,000 pounds to Holland as
a compensation for this thinly peopled settlement. She retained it
mainly because of its value as a calling-station on the way to
India. But it imposed upon her an imperial problem of a very
difficult kind. As in Canada, she had to deal here with an alien
race of European origin and proud traditions; but this racial
problem was accentuated by the further problem of dealing with a
preponderant and growing negro population. How were justice,
peace, liberty, and equality of rights to be established in such a
field?

It was, then, an astonishing new empire which had grown up round

Britain during the period when the world was becoming convinced
that colonial empires were not worth acquiring, because they could
not last. It was an empire of continents or sub-continents--
Canada, Australia, India, South Africa--not to speak of
innumerable scattered islands and trading-posts dotted over all
the seas of the world, which had either survived from an earlier
period, or been acquired in order that they might serve as naval
bases. It was spread round the whole globe; it included almost
every variety of soil, products, and climate; it was inhabited by
peoples of the most varying types; it presented an infinite
variety of political and racial problems. In 1825 this empire was
the only extra-European empire of importance still controlled by
any of the historic imperial powers of Western Europe. And at the
opening of the nineteenth century, when extra-European empires
seemed to have gone out of fashion, the greatest of all imperial
questions was the question whether the political capacity of the
British peoples, having failed to solve the comparatively simple
problem of finding a mode of organisation which could hold
together communities so closely akin as those of America and the
parent islands, would be capable of achieving any land of
effective organisation for this new astounding fabric, while at
the same time securing to all its members that liberty and variety
of development which in the case of America had only been fully
secured at the cost of disruption.

EUROPE AND THE NON-EUROPEAN WORLD 1815-1878

When the European peoples settled down, in 1815, after the long
wars of the French Revolution, they found themselves faced by many
problems, but there were few Europeans who would have included
among these problems the extension of Western civilisation over
the as yet unsubjugated portions of the world. Men's hearts were
set upon the organisation of permanent peace: that seemed the
greatest of all questions, and, for a time, it appeared to have
obtained a satisfactory solution with the organisation of the
great League of Peace of 1815. But the peace was to be short-
lived, because it was threatened by the emergence of a number of
other problems of great complexity. First among these stood the
problem of nationality: the increasingly clamorous demand of
divided or subject peoples for unity and freedom. Alongside of
this arose the sister-problem of liberalism: the demand raised
from all sides, among peoples who had never known political
liberty, for the institutions of self-government which had been
proved practicable by the British peoples, and turned into the
object of a fervent belief by the preachings of the French. These
two causes were to plunge Europe into many wars, and to vex and
divide the peoples of every European country, throughout the
period 1815-78. And to add to the complexity, there was growing in
intensity during all these years the problem of Industrialism--the
transformation of the very bases of life in all civilised
communities, and the consequent development of wholly new, and
terribly difficult, social issues. Preoccupied with all these
questions, the statesmen and the peoples of most European states
had no attention to spare for the non-European world. They
neglected it all the more readily because the events of the
preceding period seemed to demonstrate that colonial empires were
not worth the cost and labour necessary for their attainment,
since they seemed doomed to fall asunder as soon as they began to
be valuable.

Yet the period 1815-78 was to see an extension of European

civilisation in the non-European world more remarkable than that
of any previous age. The main part in this extension was played by
Britain, who found herself left free, without serious rivalry in
any part of the globe, to expand and develop the extraordinary
empire which she possessed in 1815, and to deal with the
bewildering problems which it presented. So marked was the British
predominance in colonial activity during this age that it has been
called the age of British monopoly, and so far as trans-oceanic
activities were concerned, this phrase very nearly represents the
truth. But there were other developments of the period almost as
remarkable as the growth and reorganisation of the British Empire;
and it will be convenient to survey these in the first instance
before turning to the British achievement.

The place of honour, as always in any great story of European

civilisation, belongs to France. Undeterred by the loss of her
earlier empire, and unexhausted by the strain of the great ordeal
through which she had just passed, France began in these years the
creation of her second colonial empire, which was to be in many
ways more splendid than the first. Within fifteen years of the
fall of Napoleon, the French flag was flying in Algiers.

The northern coast of Africa, from the Gulf of Syrtis to the

Atlantic, which has been in modern times divided into the three
districts of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, forms essentially a
single region, whose character is determined by the numerous
chains of the Atlas Mountains. This region, shut off from the rest
of Africa not only by the Atlas but by the most impassable of all
geographical barriers, the great Sahara desert, really belongs to
Europe rather than to the continent of which it forms a part. Its
fertile valleys were once the homes of brilliant civilisations:
they were the seat of the Carthaginian Empire, and at a later date
they constituted one of the richest and most civilised provinces
of the Roman Empire. Their civilisation was wrecked by that
barbarous German tribe, the Vandals, in the fifth century. It
received only a partial and temporary revival after the Mahomedan
conquest at the end of the seventh century, and since that date
this once happy region has gradually lapsed into barbarism. During
the modern age it was chiefly known as the home of ruthless and
destructive pirates, whose chief headquarters were at Algiers, and
who owned a merely nominal allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey.
Ever since the time of Khair-ed-din Barbarossa, in the early
sixteenth century, the powers of Europe have striven in vain to
keep the Barbary corsairs in check. Charles V., Philip II., Louis
XIV. attacked them with only temporary success: they continued to
terrorise the trade of the Mediterranean, to seize trading-ships,
to pillage the shores of Spain and Italy, and to carry off
thousands of Christians into a cruel slavery; Robinson Crusoe, it
may be recalled, was one of their victims. The powers at Vienna
endeavoured to concert action against them in 1815. They were
attacked by a British fleet in 1816, and by a combined British and
French fleet in 1819. But all such temporary measures were
insufficient. The only cure for the ill was that the headquarters
of the pirate chiefs should be conquered, and brought under
civilised government.

This task France was rather reluctantly drawn into undertaking, as

the result of a series of insults offered by the pirates to the
French flag between 1827 and 1830. At first the aim of the
conquerors was merely to occupy and administer the few ports which
formed the chief centres of piracy. But experience showed that
this was futile, since it involved endless wars with the unruly
clansmen of the interior. Gradually, therefore, the whole of
Algeria was systematically conquered and organised. The process
took nearly twenty years, and was not completed until 1848. In all
the records of European imperialism there has been no conquest
more completely justified both by the events which led up to it
and by the results which have followed from it. Peace and Law
reign throughout a country which had for centuries been given over
to anarchy. The wild tribesmen are unlearning the habits of
disorder, and being taught to accept the conditions of a civilised
life. The great natural resources of the country are being
developed as never since the days of Roman rule. No praise can be
too high for the work of the French administrators who have
achieved these results. And it is worth noting that, alone among
the provinces conquered by the European peoples, Algeria has been
actually incorporated in the mother-country; it is part of the
French Republic, and its elected representatives sit in the French
Parliament.

In the nature of things the conquest of Algeria could not stand

alone. Algeria is separated by merely artificial lines from Tunis
on the east and Morocco on the west, where the old conditions of
anarchy still survived; and the establishment of order and peace
in the middle area of this single natural region was difficult, so
long as the areas on either side remained in disorder and war. In
1844 France found it necessary to make war upon Morocco because of
the support which it had afforded to a rebellious Algerian chief,
and this episode illustrated the close connection of the two
regions. But the troops were withdrawn as soon as the immediate
purpose was served. France had not yet begun to think of extending
her dominion over the areas to the east and west of Algeria. That
was to be the work of the next period.

Further south in Africa, France retained, as a relic of her older

empire, a few posts on the coast of West Africa, notably Senegal.
From these her intrepid explorers and traders began to extend
their influence, and the dream of a great French empire in
Northern Africa began to attract French minds. But the realisation
of this dream also belongs to the next period. In the Far East,
too, this was a period of beginnings. Ever since 1787--before the
Revolution--the French had possessed a foothold on the coast of
Annam, from which French missionaries carried on their labours
among the peoples of Indo-China. Maltreatment of these
missionaries led to a war with Annam in 1858, and in 1862 the
extreme south of the Annamese Empire--the province of Cochin-
China--was ceded to France. Lastly, the French obtained a foothold
in the Pacific, by the annexation of Tahiti and the Marquesas
Islands in 1842, and of New Caledonia in 1855. But in 1878 the
French dominions in the non-European world were, apart from
Algeria, of slight importance. They were quite insignificant in
comparison with the far-spreading realms of her ancient rival,
Britain.

On a much greater scale than the expansion of France was the

expansion of the already vast Russian Empire during this period.
The history of Russia in the nineteenth century is made up of a
series of alternations between a regime of comparative liberalism,
when the interest of government and people was chiefly turned
towards the west, and a regime of reaction, when the government
endeavoured to pursue what was called a 'national' or purely
Russian policy, and to exclude all Western influences. During
these long intervals of reaction, attention was turned eastward;
and it was in the reactionary periods, mainly, that the Russian
power was rapidly extended in three directions--over the Caucasus,
over Central Asia, and in the Far East.

Before this advance, the huge Russian Empire had been (everywhere
except on the west, in the region of Poland) marked off by very
clearly defined barriers. The Caucasus presented a formidable
obstacle between Russia and the Turkish and Persian Empires; the
deserts of Central Asia separated her from the Moslem peoples of
Khiva, Bokhara and Turkestan; the huge range of the Altai
Mountains and the desert of Gobi cut off her thinly peopled
province of Eastern Siberia from the Chinese Empire; while in the
remote East her shores verged upon ice-bound and inhospitable
seas. Hers was thus an extraordinarily isolated and self-contained
empire, except on the side of Europe; and even on the side of
Europe she was more inaccessible than any other state, being all
but land-locked, and divided from Central Europe by a belt of
forests and marshes.

The part she had played in the Napoleonic Wars, and in the events
which followed them, had brought her more fully into contact with
Europe than she had ever been before. The acquisition of Poland
and Finland, which she obtained by the treaties of 1815, had
increased this contact, for both of these states were much
influenced by Western ideas. Russia had promised that their
distinct national existence, and their national institutions,
should be preserved; and this seemed to suggest that the Russian
Empire might develop into a partnership of nations of varying
types, not altogether unlike the form into which the British
Empire was developing. But this conception had no attraction for
the Russian mind, or at any rate for the Russian government; and
the reactionary or pure-Russian school, which strove to exclude
all alien influences, was inevitably hostile to it. Hence the
period of reaction, and of eastward conquest, saw also the denial
of the promises made in 1815. Poland preserved her distinct
national organisation, in any full degree, only for fifteen years;
even in the faintest degree, it was preserved for less than fifty
years. Finland was allowed a longer grace, but only, perhaps,
because she was isolated and had but a small population: her turn
for 'Russification' was to come in due course. The exclusion of
Western influence, the segregation of Russia from the rest of the
world, and the repudiation of liberty and of varieties of type
thus form the main features of the reactionary periods which
filled the greater part of this age; and the activity of Russia in
eastward expansion was in part intended to forward this policy, by
diverting the attention of the Russian people from the west
towards the east, and by substituting the pride of dominion for
the desire for liberty. Hence imperialism came to be identified,
for the Russian people, with the denial of liberty.

But it is a very striking fact that each of the three main lines
of territorial advance followed by Russia in Asia during this
period led her to overstep the natural barriers which had made her
an isolated and self-dependent empire, brought her into relation
with other civilisations, and compelled her to play her part as
one of the factors in world-politics.

Russia had begun the conquest of the wild Caucasus region as early
as 1802; after a long series of wars, she completed it by the
acquisition of the region of Kars in 1878. The mastery of the
Caucasus brought her into immediate relation with the Armenian
province of the Turkish Empire, which she henceforward threatened
from the east as well as from the west. It brought her into
contact also with the Persian Empire, over whose policy, from 1835
onwards, she wielded a growing influence, to the perturbation of
Britain. And besides bringing her into far closer relations with
the two greatest Mahomedan powers, it gave her a considerable
number of Mahomedan subjects, since some of the Caucasus tribes
belonged to that faith.

Again, the conquest of Central Asia led her to overstep the

barrier of the Kirghiz deserts. The wandering Kirghiz and Turkoman
tribes of this barren region lived largely upon the pillage of
caravans, and upon raids into neighbouring countries; they
disposed of their spoil (which often included Russian captives)
mainly in the bazars of Bokhara, Khiva, Samarkand and Khokand--
Mahomedan Khanates which occupied the more fertile areas in the
southern and south-eastern part of the desert region. The attempt
to control the Turkoman raiders brought Russia into conflict with
these outposts of Islam. Almost the whole of this region was
conquered in a long series of campaigns between 1848 and 1876.
These conquests (which covered an area 1200 miles from east to
west and 600 miles from north to south) made Russia a great
Mahomedan power. They also brought her into direct contact with
Afghanistan. Russian agents were at work in Afghanistan from 1838
onwards. The shadow of her vast power, looming over Persia and the
Persian Gulf on the one hand, and over the mountain frontiers of
India on the other, naturally appeared highly menacing to Britain.
It was the direct cause of the advance of the British power from
the Indus over North-Western India, until it could rest upon the
natural frontier of the mountains--an advance which took place
mainly during the years 1839-49. And it formed the chief source of
the undying suspicion of Russia which was the dominant note of
British foreign policy throughout the period.

Another feature of these conquests was that, taken in conjunction

with the French conquest of Algeria and the British conquest of
India, they constituted the first serious impact of European
civilisation upon the vast realm of Islam. Until now the regions
of the Middle East which had been subjugated by the followers of
Mahomed had repelled every attack of the West. More definite in
its creed, and more exacting in its demands upon the allegiance of
its adherents, than any other religion, Mahomedanism had for more
than a thousand years been able to resist with extraordinary
success the influence of other civilisations; and it had been,
from the time of the Crusades onwards, the most formidable
opponent of the civilisation of the West. Under the rule of the
Turk the Mahomedan world had become stagnant and sterile, and it
had shut out not merely the direct control of the West (which
would have been legitimate enough), but the influence of Western
ideas. All the innumerable schemes of reform which were based upon
the retention of the old regime in the Turkish Empire have
hopelessly broken down; and the only chance for an awakening in
these lands of ancient civilisation seemed to depend upon the
breakdown of the old system under the impact of Western
imperialism or insurgent nationalism. It has only been during the
nineteenth century, as a result of Russian, French, and British
imperialism, that the resisting power of Islam has begun to give
way to the influence of Europe.

The third line of Russian advance was on the Pacific coast, where
in the years 1858 and 1860 Russia obtained from China the Amur
province, with the valuable harbour of Vladivostok. It was an
almost empty land, but its acquisition made Russia a Pacific
power, and brought her into very close neighbourhood with China,
into whose reserved markets, at the same period, the maritime
powers of the West were forcing an entrance. At the same time
Russian relations with Japan, which were to have such pregnant
consequences, were beginning: in 1875 the Japanese were forced to
cede the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, and perhaps we
may date from this year the suspicion of Russia which dominated
Japanese policy for a long time to come.

Thus, while in Europe Russia was trying to shut herself off from
contact with the world, her advances in Asia had brought her at
three points into the full stream of world-politics. Her vast
empire, though for the most part very thinly peopled, formed
beyond all comparison the greatest continuous area ever brought
under a single rule, since it amounted to between eight and nine
million square miles; and when the next age, the age of rivalry
for world-power, began, this colossal fabric of power haunted and
dominated the imaginations of men.

A demonstration of the growing power of Western civilisation, even

more impressive than the expansion of the Russian Empire, was
afforded during these years by the opening to Western influence of
the ancient, pot-bound empires of the Far East, China and Japan.
The opening of China began with the Anglo-Chinese War of 1840,
which led to the acquisition of Hong-Kong and the opening of a
group of treaty ports to European trade. It was carried further by
the combined Franco-British war of 1857-58, which was ended by a
treaty permitting the free access of European travellers, traders,
and missionaries to the interior, and providing for the permanent
residence of ambassadors of the signatory powers at the court of
Pekin. All the European states rushed to share these privileges,
and the Westernising of China had begun. It did not take place
rapidly or completely, and it was accompanied by grave
disturbances, notably the Taiping rebellion, which was only
suppressed by the aid of the British General Gordon, in command of
a Chinese army. But though the process was slow, it was fully at
work by 1878. The external trade of China, nearly all in European
hands, had assumed great proportions. The missionaries and
schoolmasters of Europe and America were busily at work in the
most populous provinces. Shanghai had become a European city, and
one of the great trade-centres of the world. In a lame and
incompetent way the Chinese government was attempting to organise
its army on the European model, and to create a navy after the
European style. Steamboats were plying on the Yang-tse-kiang, and
the first few miles of railway were open. Chinese students were
beginning to resort to the universities and schools of the West;
and although the conservatism of the Chinese mind was very slow to
make the plunge, it was already plain that this vast hive of
patient, clever, and industrious men was bound to enter the orbit
of Western civilisation.

Meanwhile, after a longer and stiffer resistance, Japan had made

up her mind to a great change with amazing suddenness and
completeness. There had been some preliminary relations with the
Western peoples, beginning with the visits of the American
Commodore Perry in 1853 and 1854, and a few ports had been opened
to European trade. But then came a sudden, violent reaction
(1862). The British embassy was attacked; a number of British
subjects were murdered; a mixed fleet of British, French, Dutch,
and American ships proved the power of Western arms, and Japan
began to awaken to the necessity of adopting, in self-defence, the
methods of these intrusive foreigners. The story of the internal
revolution in Japan, which began in 1866, cannot be told here;
enough that it led to the most astounding change in history.
Emerging from her age-long isolation and from her contentment with
her ancient, unchanging modes of life, Japan realised that the
future lay with the restless and progressive civilisation of the
West; and with a national resolve to which there is no sort of
parallel or analogy in history, decided that she must not wait to
be brought under subjection, but must adopt the new methods and
ideas for herself, if possible without shedding too much of her
ancient traditions. By a deliberate exercise of the will and an
extraordinary effort of organisation, she became industrial
without ceasing to be artistic; she adopted parliamentary
institutions without abandoning her religious veneration for the
person of the Mikado; she borrowed the military methods of the
West without losing the chivalrous and fatalist devotion of her
warrior-caste; and devised a Western educational system without
disturbing the deep orientalism of her mind. It was a
transformation almost terrifying, and to any Western quite
bewildering, in its deliberation, rapidity, and completeness.
Europe long remained unconvinced of its reality. But in 1878 the
work was, in its essentials, already achieved, and the one state
of non-European origin which has been able calmly to choose what
she would accept and what she would reject among the systems and
methods of the West, stood ready to play an equal part with the
European nations in the later stages of the long imperial
struggle.

One last sphere of activity remains to be surveyed before we turn

to consider the development of the new British Empire: the
expansion of the independent states which had arisen on the ruins
of the first colonial empires in the New World. Of the Spanish and
Portuguese states of Central and South America it is not necessary
to say much. They had established their independence between 1815
and 1825. But the unhappy traditions of the long Spanish
ascendancy had rendered them incapable of using freedom well, and
Central and South America became the scene of ceaseless and futile
revolutions. The influence of the American Monroe Doctrine
forbade, perhaps fortunately, the intervention of any of the
European states to put an end to this confusion, and America
herself made no serious attempt to restrain it. It was not until
the later years of our period that any large stream of immigration
began to flow into these lands from other European countries than
Spain and Portugal, and that their vast natural resources began to
be developed by the energy and capital of Europe. But by 1878 the
more fertile of these states, Argentina, Brazil, and Chili, were
being enriched by these means, were becoming highly important
elements in the trade-system of the world, and were consequently
beginning to achieve a more stable and settled civilisation. In
some regards this work (though it belongs mainly to the period
after 1878) constitutes one of the happiest results of the extra-
European activities of the European peoples during the nineteenth
century. It was carried on, in the main, not by governments or
under government encouragement, but by the private enterprises of
merchants and capitalists; and while a very large part in these
enterprises was played by British and American traders and
settlers, one of the most notable features of the growth of South
America was that it gave play to some of the European peoples,
notably the Germans and the Italians, whose part in the political
division of the world was relatively small.

Far more impressive was the almost miraculous expansion which came
to the United States during this period. When the United States
started upon their career as an independent nation in 1782, their
territory was limited to the lands east of the Mississippi,
excluding Florida, which was still retained by Spain. Only the
eastern margin of this area was at all fully settled; and the
population numbered at most 2,000,000, predominantly of British
blood. In 1803, by a treaty with Napoleon, the French colony of
Louisiana, with vast and ill-defined claims to the territory west
of the Mississippi, was purchased from France. Meanwhile the
stream of immigrants from the eastern states, and in a less degree
from Europe, was pouring over the Alleghany Mountains and
occupying the great central plain; and by 1815 the population had
risen to almost 9,000,000, still mainly of British stock, though
it also included substantial French and German elements, as well
as large numbers of negro slaves. In 1819 Florida was acquired by
purchase from Spain. In 1845-48 a revolution in Texas (then part
of Mexico), followed by two Mexican wars, led to the annexation of
a vast area extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific
coast, including the paradise of California; while treaties with
Britain in 1818 and 1846 determined the northern boundary of the
States, and secured their control over the regions of Washington
and Oregon.

Thus the imperialist spirit was working as irresistibly in the

democratic communities of the New World as in the monarchies of
Europe. Not content with the possession of vast and almost
unpeopled areas, they had spread their dominion from ocean to
ocean, and built up an empire less extensive indeed than that of
Russia, but even more compact, far richer in resources, and far
better suited to be the home of a highly civilised people. Into
this enormous area there began to pour a mighty flood of
immigration from Europe, as soon as the Napoleonic wars were over.
By 1878 the population of the States had risen to about
50,000,000, and was greater than that of any European state save
Russia. A new world-state of the first rank had arisen. It was
made up of contributions from all the European peoples. Those of
British stock, especially the Irish, still predominated throughout
this period, but the Germans and the Scandinavians were becoming
increasingly numerous, and the Italians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs,
Russian Jews, and other stocks were beginning to form very
substantial elements. It was a melting-pot of races, which had to
be somehow welded into a nation by the moulding-power of the
traditions implanted by the earlier British settlers. It may
fairly be said that no community has ever had imposed upon it a
more difficult task than the task imposed by Fate upon the
American people of creating a national unity out of this
heterogeneous material. The great experiment was, during this
period, singularly successful. The strength of the national
sentiment and of the tradition of freedom was very powerfully
exhibited in the strain of the great Civil War (1861-65) which
maintained at a great cost the threatened unity of the republic,
and brought about the emancipation of the negro slaves. And the
Civil War produced in Abraham Lincoln a national hero, and an
exponent of the national character and ideals, worthy to be set
beside Washington. The America of Lincoln manifestly stood for
Liberty and Justice, the fundamental ideals of Western
civilisation.

But in this great moulding tradition of freedom there was one

dubious and narrowing element. Accustomed to regard herself as
having achieved liberty by shaking off her connection with the Old
World, America was tempted to think of this liberty as something
peculiar to herself, something which the 'effete monarchies' of
the Old World did not, and could not, fully understand or share,
something which exempted her from responsibility for the non-
American world, and from the duty of aiding and defending liberty
beyond her own limits. In the abounding prosperity of this
fortunate land, liberty was apt to be too readily identified
merely with the opportunity of securing material prosperity, and
the love of liberty was apt to become, what indeed it too often is
everywhere, a purely self-regarding emotion. The distance of the
republic from Europe and its controversies, its economic self-
sufficiency, its apparent security against all attack, fostered
and strengthened this feeling. While the peoples of the Old World
strove with agony and travail towards freedom and justice, or
wrestled with the task of sharing their own civilisation with the
backward races of the globe, the echo of their strivings
penetrated but faintly into the mind of America, like the noises
of the street dimly heard through the shuttered windows of a
warmed and lighted room. To the citizens of the Middle West and
the Far West, especially, busy as they were with the development
of vast untapped resources, the affairs of the outer world
necessarily appeared remote and insignificant. Even their
newspapers told them little about these far-off events. Naturally
it appeared that the function of the republic in the progress of
the world was to till its own garden, and to afford a haven of
refuge to the oppressed and impoverished who poured in from all
lands; and this idea was strengthened by the great number of
immigrants who were driven to the New World by the failure of the
successive European revolutions of the nineteenth century, and by
the oppressive tyranny of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian
despots.

This attitude of aloofness from, and contempt, or, at the best,

indifference, to the Old World was further encouraged by the
traditional treatment of American history. The outstanding event
of that story was, of course, the breach with Britain, with which
the independent existence of the Republic began, and which
constituted also almost its only direct contact with the politics
of the Old World. The view of this conflict which was driven into
the national mind by the school-books, by the annual celebrations
of the Fourth of July, and by incessant newspaper writing,
represented the great quarrel not as a dispute in a family of free
communities, in which a new and very difficult problem was raised,
and in which there were faults on both sides, but as one in which
all the right was on one side, as a heroic resistance of free men
against malevolent tyranny. This view has been profoundly modified
by the work of American historians, whose researches during the
last generation have transformed the treatment of the American
Revolution. To-day the old one-sided view finds expression, in
books of serious pretensions, only in England; and it is to
American scholars that we must have recourse for a more scientific
and impartial treatment. But the new and saner view has scarcely
yet made its way into the school-books and the newspapers. If
Britain, the mother of political liberty in the modern world, the
land from which these freemen had inherited their own liberties
and the spirit which made them insist upon their enlargement, was
made to appear a tyrant power, how could it be expected that the
mass of Americans, unversed in world-politics, should follow with
sympathy the progress of liberty beyond the limits of their own
republic? It was in the light of this traditional attitude that
the bulk of Americans regarded not only the wars and controversies
of Europe, but the vast process of European expansion. All these
things did not appear to concern them; they seemed to be caused by
motives and ideas which the great republic had outgrown, though,
as we have already seen, and shall see again, the republic had by
no means outgrown them. The strength of this traditional attitude,
fostered as it was by every circumstance, naturally made the bulk
of the American people slow to realise, when the great challenge
of Germany was forced upon the world, that the problems of world-
politics were as vitally important for them as for all other
peoples, and that no free nation could afford to be indifferent to
the fate of liberty upon the earth.

At one moment, indeed, almost at the beginning of the period, it

appeared as if this narrow outlook was about to be abandoned. The
League of Peace of the great European powers of 1815 [Footnote:
See "Nationalism and Internationalism," p. 155 ff.] had, by 1822,
developed into a league of despots for the suppression of
revolutionary tendencies. They had intervened to crush
revolutionary outbreaks in Naples and Piedmont; they had
authorised France to enter Spain in order to destroy the
democratic system which had been set up in that country in 1820.
Britain alone protested against these interventions, claiming that
every state ought to be left free to fix its own form of
government; and in 1822 Canning had practically withdrawn from the
League of Peace, because it was being turned into an engine of
oppression. It was notorious that, Spain once subjugated, the
monarchs desired to go on to the reconquest of the revolting
Spanish colonies in South America. Britain could not undertake a
war on the Continent against all the Continental powers combined,
but she could prevent their intervention in America, and Canning
made it plain that the British fleet would forbid any such action.
To strengthen his hands, he suggested to the American ambassador
that the United States might take common action in this sense. The
result was the famous message of President Monroe to Congress in
December 1823, which declared that the United States accepted the
doctrine of non-intervention, and that they would resist any
attempt on the part of the European monarchs to establish their
reactionary system in the New World.

In effect this was a declaration of support for Britain. It was so

regarded by Monroe's most influential adviser, Thomas Jefferson.
'Great Britain,' he wrote, 'is the nation which can do us the most
harm of any one, or all, on earth, and with her on our side we
need not fear the whole world. With her, then, we should the most
sedulously cherish a cordial friendship; and nothing would tend
more to knit our affection than to be fighting once more side by
side hi the same cause.' To be fighting side by side with Britain
in the same cause--the cause of the secure establishment of
freedom in the world--this seemed to the Democrat Jefferson an
object worth aiming at; and the promise of this seemed to be the
main recommendation of the Monroe Doctrine. It was intended as an
alliance for the defence of freedom, not as a proclamation of
aloofness; and thus America seemed to be taking her natural place
as one of the powers concerned to strengthen law and liberty, not
only within her own borders, but throughout the world.

The Monroe Doctrine was rapidly accepted as expressing the

fundamental principle of American foreign policy. But under the
influence of the powerful tradition which we have attempted to
analyse, its significance was gradually changed; and instead of
being interpreted as a proclamation that the great republic could
not be indifferent to the fate of liberty, and would co-operate to
defend it from attack in all cases where such co-operation was
reasonably practicable, it came to be interpreted by average
public opinion as meaning that America had no concern with the
politics of the Old World, and that the states of the Old World
must not be allowed to meddle in any of the affairs of either
American continent. The world of civilisation was to be divided
into water-tight compartments; as if it were not indissolubly one.
Yet even in this rather narrow form, the Monroe doctrine has on
the whole been productive of good; it has helped to save South
America from becoming one of the fields of rivalry of the European
powers.

But it may be doubted whether the mere enunciation of the

doctrine, even in this precise and definite form, has of itself
been sufficient to secure this end. There is good reason to
believe that the doctrine would not have been safe from challenge
if it had not been safeguarded by the supremacy of the British
Fleet. For throughout the last half-century all the world has
known that any defiance of this doctrine, and any attack upon
America, would bring Britain into the field. During all this
period one of the factors of world-politics has been the existence
of an informal and one-sided alliance between Britain and America.
The alliance has been informal, because it has not rested upon any
treaty or even upon any definite understanding. It has been one-
sided, because while average opinion in America has been
distrustful of Britain, has been apt to put unfavourable
constructions upon British policy, and has generally failed to
appreciate the value and significance of the work which Britain
has done in the outer world, Britain, on the other hand, has
always known that America stood for justice and freedom; and
therefore, however difficult the relations between the two powers
might occasionally become, Britain has steadfastly refused to
consider the possibility of a breach with America, and with rare
exceptions has steadily given her support to American policy. The
action of the British squadron off the Philippines in 1898, in
quietly interposing itself between the threatening German guns and
the American Fleet, has, in fact, been broadly typical of the
British attitude. This factor has not only helped to preserve the
Monroe Doctrine from challenge, it has indirectly contributed to
deepen the American conviction that it was possible, even in the
changed conditions of the modern world, to maintain a complete
isolation from the political controversies of the powers.

During the period 1815-1878, then, while the greater part of

Europe was still indifferent to extra-European affairs, America
had developed into a vast state wherein freedom and law were
enthroned, a huge melting-pot wherein diverse peoples were being
gradually unified and turned into a new nation under the moulding
power of a great tradition of liberty. But her geographical
position, and certain elements in her tradition, had hitherto led
her to abstain from, and even to repudiate, that great part in the
shaping of the common destinies of civilisation to which she was
manifestly called by her wealth, her numbers, her freedom, and her
share in the traditions of all the European peoples. In the nature
of things, whatever some Americans might think, this voluntary
isolation could not continue for ever. It was to be brought to an
end by the fevered developments of the next era, and by the great
challenge to the liberties of the world in which it culminated.

VI

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1815-1878

Mighty as had been the achievements of other lands which have been
surveyed in the last section, the main part in the expansion of
European civilisation over the world during the first three-
quarters of the nineteenth century was played by Britain. For she
was engaged in opening out new continents and sub-continents; and
she was giving an altogether new significance to the word
'Empire.' Above all, she was half-blindly laying the foundations
of a system whereby freedom and the enriching sense of national
unity might be realised at once in the new and vacant lands of the
earth, and among its oldest civilised peoples; she was feeling her
way towards a mode of linking diverse and free states in a common
brotherhood of peace and mutual respect. There is no section of
the history of European imperialism more interesting than the
story of the growth and organisation of the heterogeneous and
disparate empire with which Britain entered upon the new age.

This development appeared, on the surface, to be quite haphazard,

and to be governed by no clearly grasped theories or policy. It is
indeed true that at all times British policy has not been governed
by theory, but by the moulding force of a tradition of ordered
freedom. The period produced in Britain no imperialist statesman
of the first rank, nor did imperial questions play a leading part
in the deliberations of parliament. In fact, the growth of the
British Empire and its organisation were alike spontaneous and
unsystematic; their only guide (but it proved to be a good guide)
was the spirit of self-government, existing in every scattered
section of the people; and the part played by the colonists
themselves, and by the administrative officers in India and
elsewhere, was throughout more important than the part played by
colonial secretaries, East Indian directors, parliamentarians and
publicists at home. For that reason the story is not easily
handled in a broad and simple way.

Enjoying almost a monopoly of oversea activity, Britain was free,

in most parts of the world, to expand her dominions as she thought
fit. Her statesmen, however, were far from desiring further
expansion: they rightly felt that the responsibilities already
assumed were great enough to tax the resources of any state,
however rich and populous. But, try as they would, they could not
prevent the inevitable process of expansion. Several causes
contributed to produce this result. Perhaps the most important was
the unexampled growth of British trade, which during these years
dominated the whole world; and the flag is apt to follow trade. A
second cause was the pressure of economic distress and the
extraordinarily rapid increase of population at home, leading to
wholesale emigration; in the early years of the century an
extravagantly severe penal code, which inflicted the penalty of
death, commonly commuted into transportation, for an incredible
number of offences, gave an artificial impetus to this movement.
The restless and adventurous spirit of the settlers in huge and
unexplored new countries contributed another motive for expansion.
And in some cases, notably in India, political necessity seemed to
demand annexations. Over a movement thus stimulated, the home
authorities found themselves, with the best will in the world,
unable to exercise any effective restraint; and the already
colossal British Empire continued to grow. It is no doubt to be
regretted that other European nations were not able during this
period to take part in the development of the non-European world
in a more direct way than by sending emigrants to America or the
British lands. But it is quite certain that the growth of British
territory is not to be attributed in any degree to the deliberate
policy, or to the greed, of the home government, which did
everything in its power to check it.

In India the Russian menace seemed to necessitate the adoption of

a policy towards the independent states of the North-West which
brought an extension of the frontier, between 1839 and 1849, to
the great mountain ranges which form the natural boundary of India
in this direction; while a succession of intolerable and quite
unprovoked aggressions by the Burmese led to a series of wars
which resulted in the annexation of very great territories in the
east and north-east: Assam, Aracan, and Tenasserim hi 1825; Pegu
and Rangoon in 1853; finally, in 1885-86, the whole remainder of
the Burmese Empire. In North America settlers found their way
across the Rocky Mountains or over the Isthmus of Panama into the
region of British Columbia, which was given a distinct colonial
organisation in 1858; and the colonisation of the Red River
Settlement, 1811-18, which became hi 1870 the province of
Manitoba, began the development of the great central plain. In
South Africa frontier wars with the Kaffirs, and the restless
movements of Boer trekkers, brought about an expansion of the
limits of Cape Colony, the annexation of Natal, and the temporary
annexation of the Orange River Settlement and the Transvaal; but
all these additions were most reluctantly accepted; the Orange
River Settlement and the Transvaal soon had their independence
restored, though the former, at any rate, accepted it unwillingly.
In Australia, drafts of new settlers planting themselves at new
points led to the organisation of six distinct colonies between
1825 and 1859; and this implied the definite annexation of the
whole continent. New Zealand was annexed in 1839, but only because
British traders had already established themselves in the islands,
were in unhappy relations with the natives, and had to be brought
under control.

But it was not the territorial expansion of the British Empire

which gave significance to this period in its history, but, in a
far higher degree, the new principles of government which were
developed during its course. The new colonial policy which
gradually shaped itself during this age was so complete a
departure from every precedent of the past, and represented so
remarkable an experiment in imperial government, that its sources
deserve a careful analysis. It was brought into being by a number
of distinct factors and currents of opinion which were at work
both in Britain and in the colonies.

In the first place, there existed in Britain, as in other European

countries, a large body of opinion which held that all colonies
were sure to demand and obtain their independence as soon as they
became strong enough to desire it; that as independent states they
could be quite as profitable to the mother-country as they could
ever be while they remained attached to her, more especially if
the parting took place without bitterness; and that the wisest
policy for Britain to pursue was therefore to facilitate their
development, to place no barrier in the way of the increase of
their self-government, and to enable them at the earliest moment
to start as free nations on their own account. This was not,
indeed, the universal, nor perhaps even the preponderant, attitude
in regard to the colonies in the middle of the nineteenth century.
But it was pretty common. It appeared in the most unexpected
quarters, as when Disraeli said that the colonies were 'millstones
about our necks,' or as when The Times advocated in a leading
article the cession of Canada to the United States, on the ground
that annexation to the great Republic was the inevitable destiny
of that colony, and that it was much better that it should be
carried out in a peaceable and friendly way than after a conflict.
It is difficult to-day to realise that men could ever have
entertained such opinions. But they were widely held; and it must
at least be obvious that the prevalence of these views is quite
inconsistent with the idea that Britain was deliberately following
a policy of expansion and annexation in this age. Men who held
these opinions (and they were to be found in every party) regarded
with resentment and alarm every addition to what seemed to them
the useless burdens assumed by the nation, and required to be
satisfied that every new annexation of territory was not merely
justifiable, but inevitable.

A second factor which contributed to the change of attitude

towards the colonies was the growing influence of a new school of
economic thought, the school of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus.
Their ideas had begun to affect national policy as early as the
twenties, when Huskisson took the first steps on the way to free
trade. In the thirties the bulk of the trading and industrial
classes had become converts to these ideas, which won their
definite victories in the budgets of Sir Robert Peel, 1843-46, and
in those of his disciple Gladstone. The essence of this doctrine,
as it affected colonial policy, was that the regulation of trade
by government, which had been the main object of the old colonial
policy, brought no advantages, but only checked its free
development. And for a country in the position which Britain then
occupied, this was undeniably true; so overwhelming was her
preponderance in world-trade that every current seemed to set in
her direction, and the removal of artificial barriers, originally
designed to train the current towards her shores, allowed it to
follow its natural course. The only considerable opposition to
this body of economic doctrine came from those who desired to
protect British agriculture; but this motive had (at this period)
no bearing upon colonial trade. The triumph of the doctrine of
free trade meant that the principal motive which had earlier led
to restrictions upon the self-government of the colonies--the
desire to secure commercial advantages for the mother-country--was
no longer operative. The central idea of the old colonial system
was destroyed by the disciples of Adam Smith; and there no longer
remained any apparent reason why the mother-country should desire
to control the fiscal policy of the colonies. An even more
important result of the adoption of this new economic doctrine was
that it destroyed every motive which would lead the British
government to endeavour to secure for British traders a monopoly
of the traffic with British possessions. Henceforth all
territories administered under the direct control of the home
government were thrown open as freely to the merchants of other
countries as to those of Britain herself. The part which Britain
now undertook in the undeveloped regions of her empire (except in
so far as they were controlled by fully self-governing colonies)
was simply that of maintaining peace and law; and in these regions
she adopted an attitude which may fairly be described as the
attitude, not of a monopolist, but of a trustee for civilisation.
It was this policy which explains the small degree of jealousy
with which the rapid expansion of her territory was regarded by
the rest of the civilised world. If the same policy had been
followed, not necessarily at home, but in their colonial
possessions, by all the colonising powers, the motives for
colonial rivalry would have been materially diminished, and the
claims of various states to colonial territories, when the period
of rivalry began, would have been far more easily adjusted.

These were negative forces, leading merely to the abandonment of

the older colonial theories. But there were also positive and
constructive forces at work. First among them may be noted a new
body of definite theory as to the function which colonies ought to
play in the general economy of the civilised world. It was held to
be their function not (as in the older theory) to afford lucrative
opportunities for trade to the mother-country: so far as trade was
concerned it seemed to matter little whether a country was a
colony or an independent state. But the main object of
colonisation was, on this view, the systematic draining-off of the
surplus population of the older lands. This, it was felt, could
not safely be left to the operation of mere chance; and one of the
great advantages of colonial possessions was that they enabled the
country which controlled them to deal in a scientific way with its
surplus population, and to prevent the reproduction of unhealthy
conditions in the new communities, which was apt to result if
emigrants were allowed to drift aimlessly wheresoever chance took
them, and received no guidance as to the proper modes of
establishing themselves in their new homes. The great apostle of
this body of colonial theory was Edward Gibbon Wakefield; and his
book, A View of the Art of Colonisation (1847), deserves to be
noted as one of the classics of the history of imperialism. He did
not confine himself to theory, but was tireless in organising
practical experiments. They were carried out, in a curious revival
of the methods of the seventeenth century, by means of a series of
colonising companies which Wakefield promoted. The settlement of
South Australia, the first considerable settlement in the North
Island of New Zealand, and the two admirably designed and executed
settlements of Canterbury and Otago in the South Island of New
Zealand, were all examples of his methods: with the exception of
the North Island settlement, they were all very successful. Nor
were these the only instances of organised and assisted
emigration. In 1820 a substantial settlement, financed by
government, was made in the eastern part of Cape Colony, in the
region of Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth, and this brought the
first considerable body of British inhabitants into South Africa,
hitherto almost exclusively Dutch. An unsuccessful plantation at
Swan River in West Australia may also be noted. Systematic and
scientific colonisation was thus being studied in Britain during
this period as never before. In the view of its advocates Britain
was the trustee of civilisation for the administration of the most
valuable unpeopled regions of the earth, and it was her duty to
see that they were skilfully utilised. So high a degree of success
attended some of their efforts that it is impossible not to regret
that they were not carried further. But they depended upon Crown
control of undeveloped lands. With the growth of full self-
government in the colonies the exercise of these Crown functions
was transferred from the ministry and parliament of Britain to the
ministries and parliaments of the colonies; and this transference
put an end to the possibility of a centralised organisation and
direction of emigration.

A second constructive factor very potently at work during this age

was the humanitarian spirit, which had become a powerful factor in
British life during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. It had received perhaps its most practical expression
in the abolition of the slave-trade in 1806, and the campaign
against the slave-trade in the rest of the world became an
important object of British policy from that time onwards. Having
abolished the slave-trade, the humanitarians proceeded to advocate
the complete abolition of negro slavery throughout the British
Empire. They won their victory in 1833, when the British
parliament declared slavery illegal throughout the Empire, and
voted 20,000,000 pounds--at a time when British finance was still
suffering from the burdens of the Napoleonic War--to purchase from
their masters the freedom of all the slaves then existing in the
Empire. It was a noble deed, but it was perhaps carried out a
little too suddenly, and it led to grave difficulties, especially
in the West Indies, whose prosperity was seriously impaired, and
in South Africa, where it brought about acute friction with the
slave-owning Boer farmers. But it gave evidence of the adoption of
a new attitude towards the backward races, hitherto mercilessly
exploited by all the imperialist powers. One expression of this
attitude had already been afforded by the organisation (1787) of
the colony of Sierra Leone, on the West African coast, as a place
of refuge for freed slaves desiring to return to the land of their
fathers.

It was principally through the activity of missionaries that this

new point of view was expressed and cultivated. Organised
missionary activity in Britain dates from the end of the
eighteenth century, but its range grew with extraordinary rapidity
throughout the period. And wherever the missionaries went, they
constituted themselves the protectors and advocates of the native
races among whom they worked. Often enough they got themselves
into bad odour with the European traders and settlers with whom
they came in contact. But through their powerful home
organisations they exercised very great influence over public
opinion and over government policy. The power of 'Exeter Hall,'
where the religious bodies and the missionary societies held their
meetings in London, was at its height in the middle of the
nineteenth century, and politicians could not afford to disregard
it, even if they had desired to do so. This influence, supporting
the trend of humanitarian opinion, succeeded in establishing it as
one of the principles of British imperial policy that it was the
duty of the British government to protect the native races against
the exploitation of the European settlers, and to guide them
gently into a civilised way of life. It is a sound and noble
principle, and it may fairly be said that it has been honestly
carried out, so far as the powers of the home government rendered
possible. No government in the world controls a greater number or
variety of subjects belonging to the backward races than the
British; no trading nation has had greater opportunities for the
oppressive exploitation of defenceless subjects. Yet the grave
abuse of these opportunities has been infrequent. There have been
in the history of modern British imperialism sporadic instances of
injustice, like the forced labour of Kanakas in the Pacific. But
there have been no Congo outrages, no Putumayo atrocities, no
Pequena slave scandals, no merciless slaughter like that of the
Hereros in German South-West Africa.

The principle of the protection of backward peoples has, however,

sometimes had an unfortunate influence upon colonial policy; and
there was no colony in which it exercised a more unhappy effect
than South Africa. Here the Boer farmers still retained towards
their native neighbours the attitude which had been characteristic
of all the European peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries: they regarded the negro as a natural inferior, born to
servitude. It is not surprising that no love was lost between the
Boers and the missionaries, who appeared as the protectors of the
negroes, and whose representations turned British opinion
violently against the whole Boer community. This was in itself a
sufficiently unfortunate result: it lies largely at the base of
the prolonged disharmony which divided the two peoples in South
Africa. The belief that the Boers could not be trusted to deal
fairly with the natives formed, for a long period, the chief
reason which urged the British Government to retain their control
over the Boers, even when they had trekked away from the Cape
(1836) and established themselves beyond the Orange and the Vaal
rivers; and the conflict of this motive with the desire to avoid
any increase of colonial responsibilities, and with the feeling
that if the Boers disliked the British system, they had better be
left in freedom to organise themselves in their own way, accounts
for the curious vacillation in the policy of the period on this
question. At first the trekkers were left to themselves; then the
lands which they had occupied were annexed; then their
independence was recognised; and finally, when, at the end of the
period, they seemed to be causing a dangerous excitement among the
Zulus and other native tribes, the Transvaal was once more
annexed; with the result that revolt broke out, and the Majuba
campaign had to be fought.

Again, tenderness for the natives led to several curious and not
very successful experiments in organisation. The annexation of
Natal was long delayed because it was held that this area ought to
form a native reserve, and fruitless attempts were made to
restrict the settlement of Europeans in this empty and fertile
land. An attempt was also made to set up a series of native areas
under British protection, from which the white settler was
excluded. British Kaffraria, Griqualand East and Griqualand West
were examples of this policy, which is still represented, not
unsuccessfully, by the great protected area of Basutoland. But, on
the whole, these experiments in the handling of the native problem
in South Africa did more harm than good. They were unsuccessful
mainly because South Africa was a white man's country, into which
the most vigorous of the native races, those of the Bantu stock
(Kaffirs, Zulus, Matabili, etc.), were more recent immigrants than
the white men themselves. Owing to their warlike character and
rapidly growing numbers they constituted for a long time a very
formidable danger; and neither the missionaries nor the home
authorities sufficiently recognised these facts.

Perhaps the most unhappy result of this friction over the native
question, apart from the alienation of Boer and Briton which it
produced, was the fact that it was the principal cause of the long
delay in establishing self-governing institutions in South Africa.
The home government hesitated to give to the colonists full
control over their own affairs, because it distrusted the use
which they were likely to make of their powers over the natives;
even the normal institutions of all British colonies were not
established in Cape Colony till 1854, and in Natal till 1883. But
although in this case the new attitude towards the backward races
led to some unhappy results, the spirit which inspired it was
altogether admirable, and its growing strength accounts in part
for the real degree of success which has been achieved by British
administrators in the government of regions not suited for the
settlement of Europeans in large numbers. Indeed, this spirit has
come to be one of the outstanding features of modern British
imperialism.

It was not only in the treatment of backward races that the

humanitarian spirit made itself felt. It was at work also in the
government of the highly developed civilisations of India, where,
during this period, British power began to be boldly used to put
an end to barbarous or inhumane practices which were supported or
tolerated by the religious beliefs or immemorial social usages of
India. Such practices as thagi, or meria sacrifices, or female
infanticide, or, above all, sati, had been left undisturbed by the
earlier rulers of British India, because they feared that
interference with them would be resented as an infraction of
Indian custom or religion. They were now boldly attacked, and
practically abolished, without evil result.

Alongside of this new courage in measures that seemed to be

dictated by the moral ideas of the West, there was to be seen
growing throughout this period a new temper of respect for Indian
civilisation and a desire to study and understand it, and to
safeguard its best features. The study of early Indian literature,
law, and religious philosophy had indeed been begun in the
eighteenth century by Sir William Jones and Nathaniel Halhed, with
the ardent encouragement of Warren Hastings. But in this as in
other respects Hastings was ahead of the political opinion of his
time; the prevalent idea was that the best thing for India would
be the introduction, so far as possible, of British methods. This
led to the absurdities of the Supreme Court, established in 1773
to administer English law to Indians. It led also to the great
blunder of Cornwallis's settlement of the land question in Bengal,
which was an attempt to assimilate the Indian land-system to that
of England, and resulted in an unhappy weakening of the village
communities, the most healthy features of Indian rural life. In
the nineteenth century this attitude was replaced by a spirit of
respect for Indian traditions and methods of organisation, and by
a desire to retain and strengthen their best features. The new
attitude was perhaps to be seen at its best in the work of
Mountstuart Elphinstone, a great administrator who was also a
profound student of Indian history, and a very sympathetic
observer and friend of Indian customs and modes of life. But the
same spirit was exemplified by the whole of the remarkable
generation of statesmen of whom Elphinstone was one. They
established the view that it was the duty of the British power to
reorganise India, indeed, but to reorganise it on lines in
accordance with its own traditions. Above all, the principle was
in this generation very definitely established that India, like
other great dependencies, must be administered in the interests of
its own people, and not in the interests of the ruling race. That
seems to us to-day a platitude. It would not have seemed a
platitude in the eighteenth century. It would not seem a platitude
in modern Germany. And it may safely be said that the enunciation
of such a doctrine would have seemed merely absurd in any of the
earlier historical empires. In 1833 an official report laid before
the British parliament contained these remarkable words: 'It is
recognised as an indisputable principle, that the interests of the
Native Subjects are to be consulted in preference to those of
Europeans, wherever the two come in competition.' In all the
records of imperialism it would be hard to find a parallel to this
formal statement of policy by the supreme government of a ruling
race. When such a statement could be made, it is manifest that the
meaning of the word Empire had undergone a remarkable
transformation. No one can read the history of British rule in
India during this period without feeling that, in spite of
occasional lapses, this was its real spirit.

But the most powerful constructive element in the shaping of the

new imperial policy of Britain was the strength of the belief in
the idea of self-government, as not only morally desirable but
practically efficacious, which was to be perceived at work in the
political circles of Britain during this age. Self-government had
throughout the modern age been a matter of habit and practice with
the British peoples; now it became a matter of theory and belief.
And from this resulted a great change of attitude towards the
problems of colonial administration. The American problem in the
eighteenth century had arisen ultimately out of the demand of the
Americans for unqualified and responsible control over their own
affairs: the attitude of the Englishman in reply to this demand
(though he never clearly analysed it) was, in effect, that self-
government was a good and desirable thing, but that on the scale
on which the Americans claimed it, it would be fatal to the unity
of the Empire, and the unity of the Empire must come first. Faced
by similar problems in the nineteenth century, the Englishman's
response generally was that self-government on the fullest scale
was the right of all who were fit to exercise it, and the most
satisfactory working solution of political problems. Therefore the
right must be granted; and the unity of the Empire must take care
of itself. No doubt this attitude was more readily adopted because
of the widespread belief that in fact the colonies would all
sooner or later cut their connection with the mother-country. But
it was fully shared by men who did not hold this view, and who
believed strongly in the possibility and desirability of
maintaining imperial unity. It was shared, for example, by
Wakefield, a convinced imperialist if ever there was one, and by
that great colonial administrator, Sir George Grey. It was shared
by Lord Durham and by Lord John Russell, who were largely
responsible for the adoption of the new policy. Their belief and
hope was that the common possession of free institutions of
kindred types would in fact form the most effective tie between
the lands which enjoyed them. This hope obtained an eloquent
expression in the speech in which, in 1852, Russell introduced the
bill for granting to the Australian colonies self-government on
such a scale as amounted almost to independence. It is not true,
as is sometimes said, that the self-governing institutions of the
colonies were established during this period owing to the
indifference of the home authorities, and their readiness to put
an end to the connection. The new policy of these years was
deliberately adopted; and although its acceptance by parliament
was rendered easier by the prevalence of disbelief in the
permanence of the imperial tie, yet, on the part of the
responsible men, it was due to far-sighted statesmanship.

The critical test of the new colonial policy, and the most
dramatic demonstration of its efficacy, were afforded by Canada,
where, during the thirties, the conditions which preceded the
revolt of the American colonies were being reproduced with curious
exactness. The self-governing institutions established in the
Canadian colonies in 1791 very closely resembled those of the
American colonies before the revolution: they gave to the
representative houses control over taxation and legislation, but
neither control over, nor responsibility for, the executive. And
the same results were following. Incomplete self-government was
striving after its own fulfilment: the denial of responsibility
was producing irresponsibility. These was the same unceasing
friction between governors and their councils on the one hand, and
the representative bodies on the other hand; and the assemblies
were showing the same unreasonableness in refusing to meet
manifest public obligations. This state of things was becoming
steadily more acute in all the colonies, but it was at its worst
in the province of Quebec, where the constitutional friction was
embittered by a racial conflict, the executive body being British,
while the great majority of the assembly was French; and the
conflict was producing a very dangerous alienation between the two
peoples. The French colonists had quite forgotten the gratitude
they had once felt for the maintenance of their religion and of
their social organisation, and there was a strong party among them
who were bent upon open revolt, and hoped to be able to establish
a little isolated French community upon the St. Lawrence. This
party of hotheads got the upper hand, and their agitation
culminated in the rebellion of Papineau in 1837. In the other
colonies, and especially in Upper Canada, the conditions were
almost equally ominous; when Papineau revolted in Quebec, William
Mackenzie led a sympathetic rising in Ontario. The situation was
quite as alarming as the situation in the American colonies had
been in 1775. It is true that the risings were easily put down.
But mere repression formed no solution, any more than a British
victory in 1775 would have formed a solution of the American
question.

Realising this, the Whig government sent out Lord Durham, one of
their own number, to report on the whole situation. Durham was one
of the most advanced Liberals in Britain, a convinced believer in
the virtues of self-government, and he took out with him two of
the ablest advocates of scientific colonisation, Edward Gibbon
Wakefield and Charles Buller. Durham's administrative work was not
a success: his high-handed deportation of some of the rebel
leaders was strongly condemned, and he was very quickly recalled.
But he had had time to study and understand the situation, and he
presented a masterly Report on Canada, which is one of the
classics in the history of British imperialism. His explanation of
the unhappy condition of Canadian politics was not (as some were
tempted to say) that the colonists had been given too much
liberty, but that they had not been given enough. They must be
made to feel their responsibility for the working of the laws
which they adopted, and for the welfare of the whole community. As
for the conflict of races, its only cure was that both should be
made to feel their common responsibility for the destinies of the
community in which both must remain partners.

Lord Durham's recommendations were fully carried into effect,

partly in the Canada Act of 1840, but more especially by a simple
instruction issued to governors, that their ministries must
henceforward be chosen, in the British fashion, on the ground that
they commanded the support of a majority in the elected house; and
that the governors themselves must be guided by their advice. A
crucial test of this new policy came in 1849, when the ministers
and the parliamentary majority proposed to vote compensation for
property destroyed in 1837. This to many seemed compensation for
rebels, and the indignant loyalists were urgent that the governor,
Lord Elgin, should veto it. He firmly declined to do so; and thus
gave an invaluable lesson to both parties. The Canadian people,
acting through their representatives, were now responsible for
their actions. If they chose to vote for irresponsible and
dangerous devices, they must henceforward realise that they must
themselves answer for the consequences.

Thus, within a few years of the outbreak of rebellion in two

provinces, full power had been entrusted to the rebels themselves.
It was a daring policy, only to be justified by a very confident
belief in the virtues of self-government. But it was completely
and triumphantly successful. Henceforward friction between the
Canadian colonies and the mother-country ceased: if there were
grounds for complaint in the state of Canadian affairs, the
Canadians must now blame their own ministers, and the remedy lay
in their own hands. And what was the outcome? Twenty years later
the various colonies, once as full of mutual jealousies as the
American colonies had been before 1775, began to discuss the
possibility of federation. With the cordial approval and co-
operation of the home government, they drew up a scheme for the
formation of a united Dominion of Canada, including distant
British Columbia and the coastal colonies of Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; and the adoption of this
scheme, in 1867, turned Canada from a bundle of separate
settlements into a great state. To this state the home government
later made over the control of all the vast and rich lands of the
North-West, and so the destinies of half a continent passed under
its direction. It was a charge, the magnitude and challenge of
which could not but bring forth all that there was of
statesmanship among the Canadian people; and it has not failed to
do so.

One feature of Canadian constitutional development remains to be

noted. It might have been expected that the Canadians would have
been tempted to follow the political model of their great
neighbour the United States; and if their development had been the
outcome of friction with the mother-country, no doubt they would
have done so. But they preferred to follow the British model. The
keynote of the American system is division of power: division
between the federal government and the state governments, which
form mutual checks upon one another; division between the
executive and the legislature, which are independent of one
another at once in the states and in the federal government, both
being directly elected by popular vote. The keynote of the British
system is concentration of responsibility by the subordination of
the executive to the legislature. The Canadians adopted the
British principle: what had formerly been distinct colonies
became, not 'states' but 'provinces,' definitely subordinated to
the supreme central government; and whether in the federal or in
the provincial system, the control of government by the
representative body was finally established. This concord with the
British system is a fact of real import. It means that the
political usages of the home-country and the great Dominion are so
closely assimilated that political co-operation between them is
far easier than it otherwise might be; it increases the
possibility of a future link more intimate than that of mere co-
operation.

Not less whole-hearted or generous than the treatment of the

problems of Canadian government was the treatment of the same
problem in Australia. Here, as a matter of course, all the
colonies had been endowed, at the earliest possible date, with the
familiar system of representative but not responsible government.
No such acute friction as had occurred in Canada had yet shown
itself, though signs of its development were not lacking. But in
1852 an astonishing step was taken by the British parliament: the
various Australian colonies were empowered to elect single-chamber
constituent assemblies to decide the forms of government under
which they wished to live. They decided in every case to reproduce
as nearly as possible the British system: legislatures of two
chambers, with ministries responsible to them. Thus, in Australia
as in Canada, the daughter-peoples were made to feel the community
of their institutions with those of the mother-country, and the
possibility of intimate and easy co-operation was increased. Two
years later, in 1854, New Zealand was endowed with the same
system. Among all the British realms in which the white man was
predominant, only South Africa was as yet excluded from this
remarkable development. The reasons for this exclusion we have
already noted: its consequences will occupy our attention in later
pages.

Very manifestly the empire which was developing on such lines was
not an empire in the old sense--a dominion imposed by force upon
unwilling subjects. That old word, which has been used in so many
senses, was being given a wholly new connotation. It was being
made to mean a free partnership of self-governing peoples, held
together not by force, but in part by common interests, and in a
still higher degree by common sentiment and the possession of the
same institutions of liberty.

In the fullest sense, however, this new conception of empire

applied only to the group of the great self-governing colonies.
There were many other regions, even before 1878, included within
the British Empire, though as yet it had not incorporated those
vast protectorates over regions peopled by backward races which
have been added during the last generation. There were tropical
settlements like British Honduras, British Guiana, Sierra Leone,
and Cape Coast Castle; there were many West Indian Islands, and
scattered possessions like Mauritius and Hong-Kong and Singapore
and the Straits Settlements; there were garrison towns or coaling-
stations like Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, St. Helena. To none of these
were the institutions of full responsible self-government granted.
Some of them possessed representative institutions without
responsible ministries; in others the governor was assisted by a
nominated council, intended to express local opinion, but not
elected by the inhabitants; in yet others the governor ruled
autocratically. But in all these cases the ultimate control of
policy was retained by the home government. And in this general
category, as yet, the South African colonies were included. Why
were these distinctions drawn? Why did the generation of British
statesmen, who had dealt so generously with the demand for self-
government in Canada and Australia, stop short and refuse to carry
out their principles in these other cases?

It is characteristic of British politics that they are never

merely or fully logical, and that even when political doctrines
seem to enjoy the most complete ascendancy, they are never put
into effect without qualifications or exceptions. The exceptions
already named to the establishment of full self-government were
due to many and varying causes. In the first place, there was in
most of these cases no effective demand for full self-government;
and it may safely be asserted that any community in which there is
no demand for self-governing institutions is probably not in a
condition to work them with effect. Some of these possessions were
purely military posts, like Gibraltar and Aden, and were
necessarily administered as such. Others were too small and weak
to dream of assuming the full privileges. But in the majority of
cases one outstanding common feature will appear on closer
analysis. Nearly all these territories were tropical or semi-
tropical lands, whose British inhabitants were not permanent
settlers, but were present solely for the purposes of trade or
other exploitation, while the bulk of the population consisted of
backward peoples, whose traditions and civilisation rendered their
effective participation in public affairs quite impracticable. In
such cases, to have given full political power to the small and
generally shifting minority of white men would have been to give
scope to many evils; and to have enfranchised, on a mere theory,
the mass of the population would have been to produce still worse
results. It would have sentenced these communities to the sort of
fate which has befallen the beautiful island of Hayti, where the
self-government of a population of emancipated negro slaves has
brought nothing but anarchy and degradation. In such conditions
the steady Reign of Law is the greatest boon that can be given to
white settlers and coloured subjects alike; and the final
authority is rightly retained by the home government, inspired, as
British opinion has long required that it should be, by the
principle that the rights of the backward peoples must be
safeguarded. Under this system, both law and a real degree of
liberty are made possible; whereas under a doctrinaire application
of the theory of self-government, both would vanish.

But there remains the vast dominion of India, which falls neither
into the one category nor into the other. Though there are many
primitive and backward elements among its vast population, there
are also peoples and castes whose members are intellectually
capable of meeting on equal terms the members of any of the ruling
races of the West. Yet during this age, when self-government on
the amplest scale was being extended to the chief regions of the
British Empire, India, the greatest dominion of them all, did not
obtain the gift of representative institutions even on the most
modest scale. Why was this?

It was not because the ruling race was hostile to the idea, or
desired merely to retain its own ascendancy. On the contrary, both
in Britain and among the best of the British administrators in
India, it was increasingly held that the only ultimate
justification for the British power in India would be that under
its guidance the Indian peoples should be gradually enabled to
govern themselves. As early as 1824, when in Europe sheer reaction
was at its height, this view was being strongly urged by one of
the greatest of Anglo-Indian administrators, Sir Thomas Munro, a
soldier of distinction, then serving as governor of Madras. 'We
should look upon India,' he wrote, 'not as a temporary possession,
but as one which is to be maintained permanently, until the
natives shall have abandoned most of their superstitions and
prejudices, and become sufficiently enlightened to frame a regular
government for themselves, and to conduct and preserve it.
Whenever such a time shall arrive, it will probably be best for
both countries that the British control over India should be
gradually withdrawn. That the desirable change contemplated may in
some after age be effected in India, there is no cause to despair.
Such a change was at one time in Britain itself at least as
hopeless as it is here. When we reflect how much the character of
nations has always been influenced by that of governments, and
that some, once the most cultivated, have sunk into barbarism,
while others, formerly the rudest, have attained the highest point
of civilisation, we shall see no reason to doubt that if we pursue
steadily the proper measures, we shall in time so far improve the
character of our Indian subjects as to make them able to govern
and protect themselves.'

In other words, self-government was the desirable end to be

pursued in India as elsewhere; but in India there were many and
grave obstacles to its efficient working, which could only slowly
be overcome. In the first place, India is more deeply divided in
race, language, and religion than any other region of the world.
Nowhere else is there such a medley of peoples of every grade of
development, from the almost savage Bhil to the cultivated and
high-bred Brahmin or Rajput or Mahomedan chief. There are sharp
regional differences, as great as those between the European
countries; but cutting across these there are everywhere the rigid
and impermeable distinctions of caste, which have no parallel
anywhere else in the world. The experience of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, whose confusion of races is simplicity itself in
comparison with the chaos of India, affords a significant
demonstration of the fact that parliamentary institutions, if they
are established among deeply divided peoples, must almost
inevitably be exploited for the purpose of racial ascendancy by
the most vigorous or the best-organised elements among the people;
and a very ugly tyranny is apt to result, as it has resulted in
Austro-Hungary. This consequence would almost certainly follow the
establishment of a full representative system in India. In the
cities of mediaeval Italy, when the conflict of parties became so
acute that neither side could expect justice from the other, the
practice grew up of electing a podesta from some foreign city to
act as an impartial arbiter. The British power in India has played
the part of a podesta in restraining and mediating between the
conflicting peoples and religions of India.

But again (and this is even more fundamental), for thousands of

years the history of India has been one long story of conquests
and tyrannies by successive ruling races. Always Might has been
Right, so that the lover of righteousness could only pursue it,
like the mediaeval ascetic, by cutting himself off from the world,
abjuring all social ties, and immolating the flesh in order to
live by the spirit. Always Law had been, in the last resort, the
Will of the Stronger, not the decree of impartial justice. Always
the master-races, the predatory bands, the ruling castes, had
expected to receive, and the mass of the people had been
accustomed to give, the most abject submission; and these habits
were difficult to overcome. 'In England,' says Sir Thomas Munro,
'the people resist oppression, and it is their spirit which gives
efficacy to the law: in India the people rarely resist oppression,
and the law intended to secure them from it can therefore derive
no aid from themselves. ... It is in vain to caution them against
paying by telling them that the law is on their side, and will
support them in refusing to comply with unauthorised demands. All
exhortations on this head are thrown away, and after listening to
them they will the very next day submit to extortion as quietly as
before.' How could representative institutions be expected to work
under such conditions? They would have lacked the very foundation
upon which alone they can firmly rest: respect for law, and public
co-operation in the enforcement of it. Thus the supreme service
which the government of India could render to its people was the
establishment and maintenance of the Reign of Law, and of the
liberty which it shelters. In such conditions representative
government would be liable to bring, not liberty, but anarchy and
the renewal of lawless oppression.

But although the extension of the representative system to India

neither was nor could be attempted in this age, very remarkable
advances were made towards turning India in a real sense into a
self-governing country. It ceased to be regarded or treated as a
subject dominion existing solely for the advantage of its
conquerors. That had always been its fate in all the long
centuries of its history; and in the first period of British rule
the trading company which had acquired this amazing empire had
naturally regarded it as primarily a source of profit. In 1833 the
company was forbidden to engage in trade, and the profit-making
motive disappeared. The shareholders still continued to receive a
fixed dividend out of the Indian revenues, but this may be
compared to a fixed debt-charge, an annual payment for capital
expended in the past; and it came to an end when the company was
abolished in 1858. Apart from this dividend, no sort of tribute
was exacted from India by the ruling power. India was not even
required to contribute to the upkeep of the navy, which protected
her equally with the rest of the Empire, or of the diplomatic
service, which was often concerned with her interests. She paid
for the small army which guarded her frontiers; but if any part of
it was borrowed for service abroad, its whole pay and charges were
met by Britain. She paid the salaries and pensions of the handful
of British administrators who conducted her government, but this
was a very small charge in comparison with the lavish outlay of
the native princes whom they had replaced. India had become a
self-contained state, whose whole resources were expended
exclusively upon her own needs, and expended with the most
scrupulous honesty, and under the most elaborate safeguards.

They were expended, moreover, especially during the later part of

this period, largely in equipping her with the material apparatus
of modern civilisation. Efficient police, great roads, a postal
service cheaper than that of any other country, a well-planned
railway system, and, above all, a gigantic system of irrigation
which brought under cultivation vast regions hitherto desert--
these were some of the boons acquired by India during the period.
They were rendered possible partly by the economical management of
her finances, partly by the liberal expenditure of British
capital. Above all, the period saw the beginning of a system of
popular education, of which the English language became the main
vehicle, because none of the thirty-eight recognised vernacular
tongues of India either possessed the necessary literature, or
could be used as a medium for instruction in modern science. In
1858 three universities were established; and although their
system was ill-devised, under the malign influence of the analogy
of London University, a very large and increasing number of young
graduates, trained for modern occupations, began to filter into
Indian society, and to modify its point of view. All speaking and
writing English, and all trained in much the same body of ideas,
they possessed a similarity of outlook and a vehicle of
communication such as had never before linked together the various
races and castes of India. This large and growing class, educated
in some measure in the learning of the West, formed already, at
the end of the period, a very important new element in the life of
India. They were capable of criticising the work of their
government; they were not without standards of comparison by which
to measure its achievements; and, aided by the large freedom
granted to the press under the British system, they were able to
begin the creation of an intelligent public opinion, which was
apt, in its first movements, to be ill-guided and rash, but which
was nevertheless a healthy development. That this newly created
class of educated men should produce a continual stream of
criticism, and that it should even stimulate into existence public
discontents, is by no means a condemnation of the system of
government which has made these developments possible. On the
contrary, it is a proof that the system has had an invigorating
effect. For the existence and the expression of discontent is a
sign of life; it means that there is an end of that utter docility
which marks a people enslaved body and soul. India has never been
more prosperous than she is to-day; she has never before known so
impartial a system of justice as she now possesses; and these are
legitimate grounds of pride to her rulers. But they may even more
justly pride themselves upon the fact that in all her history
India has never been so frankly and incessantly critical of her
government as she is to-day; never so bold in the aspirations for
the future which her sons entertain.

The creation of the new class of Western-educated Indians also

facilitated another development which the British government
definitely aimed at encouraging: the participation of Indians in
the conduct of administration in their own land. The Act of 1833
had laid it down as a fundamental principle that 'no native of the
said territories ... shall by reason only of his religion, place
of birth, descent, or any of them, be disabled from holding any
place, office, or employment.' The great majority of the minor
administrative posts had always been held by Indians; but until
1833 it had been held that the maintenance of British supremacy
required that the higher offices should be reserved to members of
the ruling race. This restriction was now abolished; but it was
not until the development of the educational system had produced a
body of sufficiently trained men that the new principle could
produce appreciable results; and even then, the deficiencies of an
undeveloped system of training, combined with the racial and
religious jealousies which the government of India must always
keep in mind, imposed limitations upon the rapid increase of the
number of Indians holding the higher posts. Still, the principle
had been laid down, and was being acted upon. And that also
constituted a great step towards self-government.

India in 1878 was governed, under the terms of a code of law based
upon Indian custom, by a small body of British officials, among
whom leading Indians were gradually taking their place, and who
worked in detail through an army of minor officials, nearly all of
Indian birth, and selected without regard to race or creed. She
was a self-contained country whose whole resources were devoted to
her own needs. She was prospering to a degree unexampled in her
history; she had achieved a political unity never before known to
her; she had been given the supreme boon of a just and impartial
law, administered without fear or favour; and she had enjoyed a
long period of peace, unbroken by any attack from external foes.
Here also, as fully as in the self-governing colonies, membership
of the British Empire did not mean subjection to the selfish
dominion of a master, or the subordination to that master's
interests of the vital interests of the community. It meant the
establishment among a vast population of the essential gifts of
Western civilisation, rational law, and the liberty which exists
under its shelter. Empire had come to mean, not merely domination
pursued for its own sake, but trusteeship for the extension of
civilisation.

The period of practical British monopoly, 1815-1878, had thus

brought about a very remarkable transformation in the character of
the British Empire. It had greatly increased in extent, and by
every test of area, population, and natural resources, it was
beyond comparison the greatest power that had ever existed in the
world. But its organisation was of an extreme laxity; it possessed
no real common government; and its principal members were united
rather by a community of institutions and ideas than by any formal
ties. Moreover, it presented a more amazing diversity of racial
types, of religions, and of grades of civilisation, than any other
political fabric which had existed in history. Its development had
assuredly brought about a very great expansion of the ideas of
Western civilisation over the face of the globe, and, above all, a
remarkable diffusion of the institutions of political liberty. But
it remained to be proved whether this loosely compacted bundle of
states possessed any real unity, or would be capable of standing
any severe strain. The majority of observers, both in Britain
itself and throughout the world, would have been inclined, in
1878, to give a negative answer to these questions.

VII

THE ERA OF THE WORLD-STATES, 1878-1900

The Congress of Berlin in 1878 marks the close of the era of

nationalist revolutions and wars in Europe. By the same date all
the European states had attained to a certain stability in their
constitutional systems. With equal definiteness this year may be
said to mark the opening of a new era in the history of European
imperialism; an era of eager competition for the control of the
still unoccupied regions of the world, in which the concerns of
remote lands suddenly became matters of supreme moment to the
great European powers, and the peace of the world was endangered
by questions arising in China or Siam, in Morocco or the Soudan,
or the islands of the Pacific. The control of Europe over the non-
European world was in a single generation completed and confirmed.
And the most important of the many questions raised by this
development was the question whether the spirit in which this
world-supremacy of Europe was to be wielded should be the spirit
which long experience had inspired in the oldest of the colonising
nations, the spirit of trusteeship on behalf of civilisation; or
whether it was to be the old, brutal, and sterile spirit of mere
domination for its own sake.

On a superficial view the most obvious feature of this strenuous

period was that all the remaining unexploited regions of the world
were either annexed by one or other of the great Western states,
or were driven to adopt, with greater or less success, the modes
of organisation of the West. But what was far more important than
any new demarcation of the map was that not only the newly annexed
lands, but also the half-developed territories of earlier European
dominions, were with an extraordinary devouring energy penetrated
during this generation by European traders and administrators,
equipped with railways, steam-boats, and all the material
apparatus of modern life, and in general organised and exploited
for the purposes of industry and trade. This astonishing
achievement was almost as thorough as it was swift. And its result
was, not merely that the political control of Europe over the
backward regions of the world was strengthened and secured by
these means, but that the whole world was turned into a single
economic and political unit, no part of which could henceforth
dwell in isolation. This might have meant that we should have been
brought nearer to some sort of world-order; but unhappily the
spirit in which the great work was undertaken by some, at least,
of the nations which participated in it has turned this wonderful
achievement into a source of bitterness and enmity, and led the
world in the end to the tragedy and agony of the Great War.

The causes of this gigantic outpouring of energy were manifold.

The main impelling forces were perhaps economic rather than
political. But the economic needs of this strenuous age might have
been satisfied without resort to the brutal arbitrament of war:
their satisfaction might even have been made the means of
diminishing the danger of war. It was the interpretation of these
economic needs in terms of an unhappy political theory which has
led to the final catastrophe.

On a broad view, the final conquest of the world by European

civilisation was made possible, and indeed inevitable, by the
amazing development of the material aspects of that civilisation
during the nineteenth century; by the progressive command over the
forces of nature which the advance of science had placed in the
hands of man, by the application of science to industry in the
development of manufacturing methods and of new modes of
communication, and by the intricate and flexible organisation of
modern finance. These changes were already in progress before
1878, and were already transforming the face of the world. Since
1878 they have gone forward with such accelerating speed that we
have been unable to appreciate the significance of the revolution
they were effecting. We have been carried off our feet; and have
found it impossible to adjust our moral and political ideas to the
new conditions.

The great material achievements of the last two generations have

been mainly due to an intense concentration and specialisation of
functions among both men of thought and men of action. But the
result of this has been that there have been few to attempt the
vitally important task of appreciating the movement of our
civilisation as a whole, and of endeavouring to determine how far
the political conceptions inherited from an earlier age were valid
in the new conditions. For under the pressure of the great
transformation political forces also have been transformed, and in
all countries political thought is baffled and bewildered by the
complexity of the problems by which it is faced. To this in part
we owe the dimness of vision which overtook us as we went whirling
together towards the great catastrophe. It is only in the glare of
a world-conflagration that we begin to perceive, in something like
their true proportions, the great forces and events which have
been shaping our destinies. In the future, if the huge soulless
mechanism which man has created is not to get out of hand and
destroy him, we must abandon that contempt for the philosopher and
the political thinker which we have latterly been too ready to
express, and we must recognise that the task of analysing and
relating to one another the achievements of the past and the
problems of the present is at least as important as the increase
of our knowledge and of our dangerous powers by intense and narrow
concentration within very limited fields of thought and work.

In the meantime we must observe (however briefly and

inadequately), how the dazzling advances of science and industry
have affected the conquest of the world by European civilisation,
and why it has come about that instead of leading to amity and
happiness, they have brought us to the most hideous catastrophe in
human history.

Science and industry, in the first place, made the conquest and
organisation of the world easy. In the first stages of the
expansion of Europe the material superiority of the West had
unquestionably afforded the means whereby its political ideas and
institutions could be made operative in new fields. The invention
of ocean-going ships, the use of the mariner's compass, the
discovery of the rotundity of the earth, the development of
firearms--these were the things which made possible the creation
of the first European empires; though these purely material
advantages could have led to no stable results unless they had
been wielded by peoples possessing a real political capacity. In
the same way the brilliant triumphs of modern engineering have
alone rendered possible the rapid conquest and organisation of
huge undeveloped areas; the deadly precision of Western weapons
has made the Western peoples irresistible; the wonderful progress
of medical science has largely overcome the barriers of disease
which long excluded the white man from great regions of the earth;
and the methods of modern finance, organising and making available
the combined credit of whole communities, have provided the means
for vast enterprises which without them could never have been
undertaken.

Then, in the next place, science has found uses for many
commodities which were previously of little value, and many of
which are mainly produced in the undeveloped regions of the earth.
Some of these, like rubber, or nitrates, or mineral and vegetable
oils, have rapidly become quite indispensable materials, consumed
by the industrial countries on an immense scale. Accordingly, the
more highly industrialised a country is, the more dependent it
must be upon supplies drawn from all parts of the world; not only
supplies of food for the maintenance of its teeming population,
but, even more, supplies of material for its industries. The days
when Europe, or even America, was self-sufficient are gone for
ever. And in order that these essential supplies may be available,
it has become necessary that all the regions which produce them
should be brought under efficient administration. The anarchy of
primitive barbarism cannot be allowed to stand in the way of
access to these vital necessities of the new world-economy. It is
merely futile for well-meaning sentimentalists to talk of the
wickedness of invading the inalienable rights of the primitive
occupants of these lands: for good or for ill, the world has
become a single economic unit, and its progress cannot be stopped
out of consideration for the time-honoured usages of uncivilised
and backward tribes. Of course it is our duty to ensure that these
simple folks are justly treated, led gently into civilisation, and
protected from the iniquities of a mere ruthless exploitation,
such as, in some regions, we have been compelled to witness. But
Western civilisation has seized the reins of the world, and it
will not be denied. Its economic needs drive it to undertake the
organisation of the whole world. What we have to secure is that
its political principles shall be such as will ensure that its
control will be a benefit to its subjects as well as to itself.
But the development of scientific industry has made European
control and civilised administration inevitable throughout the
world.

It did not, however, necessarily follow from these premises that

the great European states which did not already possess extra-
European territories were bound to acquire such lands. So far as
their purely economic needs were concerned, it would have been
enough that they should have freedom of access, on equal terms
with their neighbours, to the sources of the supplies they
required. It is quite possible, as events have shown, for a
European state to attain very great success in the industrial
sphere without possessing any political control over the lands
from which its raw materials are drawn, or to which its finished
products are sold. Norway has created an immense shipping industry
without owning a single port outside her own borders. The
manufactures of Switzerland are as thriving as these of any
European country, though Switzerland does not possess any
colonies. Germany herself, the loudest advocate of the necessity
of political control as the basis of economic prosperity, has
found it possible to create a vast and very prosperous industry,
though her colonial possessions have been small, and have
contributed scarcely at all to her wealth. Her merchants and
capitalists have indeed found the most profitable fields for their
enterprises, not in their own colonies, which they have on the
whole tended to neglect, but in a far greater degree in South and
Central America, and in India and the other vast territories of
the British Empire, which have been open to them as freely as to
British merchants. All that the prosperity of European industry
required was that the sources of supply should be under efficient
administration, and that access to them should be open. And these
conditions were fulfilled, before the great rush began, over the
greater part of the earth. If in 1878, when the European nations
suddenly awoke to the importance of the non-European world, they
had been able to agree upon some simple principle which would have
secured equal treatment to all, how different would have been the
fate of Europe and the world! If it could have been laid down, as
a principle of international law, that in every area whose
administration was undertaken by a European state, the 'open door'
should be secured for the trade of all nations equally, and that
this rule should continue in force until the area concerned
acquired the status of a distinctly organised state controlling
its own fiscal system, the industrial communities would have felt
secure, the little states quite as fully as the big states.
Moreover, since, under these conditions, the annexation of
territory by a European state would not have threatened the
creation of a monopoly, but would have meant the assumption of a
duty on behalf of civilisation, the acrimonies and jealousies
which have attended the process of partition would have been
largely conjured away. In 1878 such a solution would have
presented few difficulties. For at that date the only European
state which controlled large undeveloped areas was Britain; and
Britain, as we have seen, had on her own account arrived at this
solution, and had administered, as she still administers, all
those regions of her Empire which do not possess self-governing
rights in the spirit of the principle we have suggested.

Why was it that this solution, or some solution on these lines,

was not then adopted, and had no chance of being adopted? It was
because the European states, and first and foremost among them
Germany, were still dominated by a political theory which forbade
their taking such a view. We may call this theory the Doctrine of
Power. It is the doctrine that the highest duty of every state is
to aim at the extension of its own power, and that before this
duty every other consideration must give way. The Doctrine of
Power has never received a more unflinching expression than it
received from the German Treitschke, whose influence was at its
height during the years of the great rush for extra-European
possessions. The advocate of the Doctrine of Power is not, and
cannot be, satisfied with equality of opportunity; he demands
supremacy, he demands monopoly, he demands the means to injure and
destroy his rivals. It would not be just to say that this doctrine
was influential only in Germany; it was in some degree potent
everywhere, especially in this period, which was the period par
excellence of 'imperialism' in the bad sense of the term. But it
is certainly true that no state has ever been so completely
dominated by it as Germany; and no state less than Britain. It was
in the light of this doctrine that the demands of the new
scientific industry were interpreted. Hag-ridden by this
conception, when the statesmen of Europe awoke to the importance
of the non-European world, it was not primarily the economic needs
of their countries that they thought of, for these were, on the
whole, not inadequately met: what struck their imagination was
that, in paying no attention to the outer world, they had missed
great opportunities of increasing their power. This oversight,
they resolved, must be rectified before it was too late.

For when the peoples of Western and Central Europe, no longer

engrossed by the problems of Nationalism and Liberalism, cast
their eyes over the world, lo! the scale of things seemed to have
changed. Just as, in the fifteenth century, civilisation had
suddenly passed from the stage of the city-state or the feudal
principality to the stage of the great nation-state, so now, while
the European peoples were still struggling to realise their
nationhood, civilisation seemed to have stolen a march upon them,
and to have advanced once more, this time into the stage of the
world-state. For to the east of the European nations lay the vast
Russian Empire, stretching from Central Europe across Asia to the
Pacific; and in the west the American Republic extended from ocean
to ocean, across three thousand miles of territory; and between
these and around them spread the British Empire, sprawling over
the whole face of the globe, on every sea and in every continent.
In contrast with these giant empires, the nation-states of Europe
felt themselves out of scale, just as the Italian cities in the
sixteenth century must have felt themselves out of scale in
comparison with the new nation-states of Spain and France. To
achieve the standard of the world-state, to make their own nations
the controlling factors in wide dominions which should include
territories and populations of varied types, became the ambition
of the most powerful European states. A new political ideal had
captivated the mind of Europe.

These powerful motives were reinforced by others which arose from

the development of affairs within Europe itself. In the first
place, the leading European states had by 1878 definitely
abandoned that tendency towards free trade which had seemed to be
increasing in strength during the previous generation; and,
largely in the hope of combating the overwhelming mercantile and
industrial supremacy of Britain, had adopted the fiscal policy of
protection. The ideal of the protectionist creed is national self-
sufficiency in the economic sphere. But, as we have seen, economic
self-sufficiency was no longer attainable in the conditions of
modern industry by any European state. Only by large foreign
annexations, especially in the tropical regions, did it seem
possible of achievement. But when a protectionist state begins to
acquire territory, the anticipation that it will use its power to
exclude or destroy the trade of its rivals must drive other states
to safeguard themselves by still further annexations. It was,
indeed, this fear which mainly drove Britain, in spite of, or
perhaps because of, her free trade theories, into a series of
large annexations in regions where her trade had been hitherto
predominant.

Again, the most perturbing feature of the relations between the

European powers also contributed to produce an eagerness for
colonial possessions. Europe had entered upon the era of huge
national armies; the example of Prussia, and the rancours which
had been created by her policy, had set all the nations arming
themselves. They had learned to measure their strength by their
available man-power, and in two ways the desire to increase the
reserve of military manhood formed a motive for colonisation. In
the first place, the surplus manhood of a nation was lost to it if
it was allowed to pass under an alien flag by emigration. Those
continental states from which emigration took place on a large
scale began to aspire after the possession of colonies of their
own, where their emigrants could still be kept under control, and
remain subject to the obligations of service. Germany, the state
which beyond all others measures its strength by its fighting man-
power, was most affected by this motive, which formed the chief
theme of the colonial school among her politicians and
journalists, and continued to be so even when the stream of her
emigrants had dwindled to very small proportions. In a less
degree, Italy was influenced by the same motive. In the second
place, conquered subjects even of backward races might be made
useful for the purposes of war. This motive appealed most strongly
to France. Her home population was stationary. She lived in
constant dread of a new onslaught from her formidable neighbour;
and she watched with alarm the rapid increase of that neighbour's
population, and the incessant increases in the numbers of his
armies. At a later date Germany also began to be attracted by the
possibility of drilling and arming, among the negroes of Central
Africa, or the Turks of Asia Minor, forces which might aid her to
dominate the world.

Thus the political situation in Europe had a very direct influence

upon the colonising activity of this period. The dominant fact of
European politics during this generation was the supreme prestige
and influence of Germany, who, not content with an unquestioned
military superiority to any other power, had buttressed herself by
the formation (1879 and 1882) of the most formidable standing
alliance that has ever existed in European history, and completely
dominated European politics. France, having been hurled from the
leadership of Europe in 1870, dreaded nothing so much as the
outbreak of a new European war, in which she must he inevitably
involved, and in which she might be utterly ruined. She strove to
find a compensation for her wounded pride in colonial adventures,
and therefore became, during the first part of the period, the
most active of the powers in this field. She was encouraged to
adopt this policy by Bismarck, partly in the hope that she might
thus forget Alsace, partly in order that she might be kept on bad
terms with Britain, whose interests seemed to be continually
threatened by her colonising activity. But she hesitated to take a
very definite line in regard to territories that lay close to
Europe and might involve European complications.

Bismarck himself took little interest in colonial questions,

except in so far as they could be used as a means of alienating
the other powers from one another, and so securing the European
supremacy of Germany. He therefore at first made no attempt to use
the dominant position of Germany as a means of acquiring extra-
European dominions. But the younger generation in Germany was far
from sharing this view. It was determined to win for Germany a
world-empire, and in 1884 and the following years--rather late in
the day, when most of the more desirable territories were already
occupied--it forced Bismarck to annex large areas. After
Bismarck's fall, in 1890, this party got the upper hand in German
politics, and the creation of a great world-empire became, as we
shall see, the supreme aim of William II. and his advisers. The
formidable and threatening power of Germany began to be
systematically employed not merely for the maintenance of
supremacy in Europe, which could be secured by peaceful means, but
for the acquisition of a commanding position in the outer world;
and since this could only be attained by violence, the world being
now almost completely partitioned, the new policy made Germany the
source of unrest and apprehension, as she had earlier been, and
still continued to be, the main cause of the burden of military
preparation in Europe.

Among the other powers which participated in the great partition,

Russia continued her pressure in two of the three directions which
she had earlier followed-south-eastwards in Central Asia,
eastwards towards China. In both directions her activity aroused
the nervous fears of Britain, while her pressure upon China helped
to bring Japan into the ranks of the militant and aggressive
powers. But Russia took no interest in the more distant quarters
of the world. Nor did Austria, though during these years her old
ambition to expand south-eastwards at the expense of Turkey and
the Balkan peoples revived under German encouragement. Italy,
having but recently achieved national unity and taken her place
among the Great Powers, felt that she could not be left out of the
running, now that extra-European possessions had come to appear an
almost essential mark of greatness among states; and, disappointed
of Tunis, she endeavoured to find compensation on the shores of
the Red Sea. Spain and Portugal, in the midst of all these eager
rivalries, were tempted to furbish up their old and half-dormant
claims. Even the United States of America joined in the rush
during the fevered period of the 'nineties.

Lastly, Britain, the oldest and the most fully endowed of all the
colonising powers, was drawn, half unwilling, into the
competition; and having an immense start over her rivals, actually
acquired more new territory than any of them. She was, indeed,
like the other states, passing through an 'imperialist' phase in
these years. The value attached by other countries to oversea
possessions awakened among the British people a new pride in their
far-spread dominions. Disraeli, who was in the ascendant when the
period opened, had forgotten his old opinion of the uselessness of
colonies, and had become a prophet of Empire. An Imperial
Federation Society was founded in 1878. The old unwillingness to
assume new responsibilities died out, or diminished; and the rapid
annexations of other states, especially France, in regions where
British influence had hitherto been supreme, and whose chieftains
had often begged in vain for British protection, aroused some
irritation. The ebullient energy of the colonists themselves,
especially in South Africa and Australia, demanded a forward
policy. Above all, the fact that the European powers, now so eager
for colonial possessions, had all adopted the protectionist policy
aroused a fear lest British traders should find themselves shut
out from lands whose trade had hitherto been almost wholly in
their hands; and the militant and aggressive temper sometimes
shown by the agents of these powers awakened some nervousness
regarding the safety of the existing British possessions. Hence
Britain, after a period of hesitancy, became as active as any of
the other states in annexation. Throughout this period her main
rival was France, whose new claims seemed to come in conflict with
her own in almost every quarter of the globe. This rivalry
produced acute friction, which grew in intensity until it reached
its culminating point in the crisis of Fashoda in 1898, and was
not removed until the settlement of 1904 solved all the
outstanding difficulties. It would be quite untrue to say that
Britain deliberately endeavoured to prevent or to check the rapid
colonial expansion of France. The truth is that British trading
interests had been predominant in many of the regions where the
French were most active, and that the protectionist policy which
France had adopted stimulated into a new life the ancient rivalry
of these neighbour and sister nations. Towards the colonial
ambitions of Germany, and still more of Italy, Britain was far
more complaisant.

It is difficult to give in a brief space a clear summary of the

extremely complicated events and intrigues of this vitally
important period. But perhaps it will be easiest if we consider in
turn the regions in which the strenuous rivalries of the powers
displayed themselves. The most important was Africa, which lay
invitingly near to Europe, and was the only large region of the
world which was still for the most part unoccupied. Here all the
competitors, save Russia, Japan, and America, played a part.
Western Asia formed a second field, in which three powers only,
Russia, Germany, and Britain, were immediately concerned. The Far
East, where the vast Empire of China seemed to be falling into
decrepitude, afforded the most vexed problems of the period.
Finally, the Pacific Islands were the scene of an active though
less intense rivalry.

It is a curious fact that Africa, the continent whose outline was

the first outside of Europe itself to be fully mapped out by the
European peoples, was actually the last to be effectively brought
under the influence of European civilisation. This was because the
coasts of Africa are for the most part inhospitable; its vast
interior plateau is almost everywhere shut off either by belts of
desert land, or by swampy and malarious regions along the coast;
even its great rivers do not readily tempt the explorer inland,
because their course is often interrupted by falls or rapids not
far from their mouths, where they descend from the interior
plateau to the coastal plain; and its inhabitants, warlike and
difficult to deal with, are also peoples of few and simple wants,
who have little to offer to the trader. Hence eight generations of
European mariners had circumnavigated the continent without
seriously attempting to penetrate its central mass; and apart from
the Anglo-Dutch settlements at the Southern extremity, the French
empire in Algeria in the north, a few trading centres on the West
Coast, and some half-derelict Portuguese stations in Angola and
Mozambique, the whole continent remained available for European
exploitation in 1878.

What trade was carried on, except in Egypt, in Algeria, and in the
immediate vicinity of the old French settlements on the West
Coast, was mainly in the hands of British merchants. Over the
greater part of the coastal belts only the British power was known
to the native tribes and chieftains. Many of them (like the Sultan
of Zanzibar and the chiefs of the Cameroons) had repeatedly begged
to be taken under British protection, and had been refused. During
the two generations before 1878 the interior of the continent had
begun to be known. But except in the north and north-west, where
French explorers and a few Germans had been active, the work had
been mainly done by British travellers. Most of the great names of
African exploration--Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Baker, Cameron
and the Anglo-American Stanley--were British names. These facts,
of course, gave to Britain, already so richly endowed, no sort of
claim to a monopoly of the continent. But they naturally gave her
a right to a voice in its disposal. Only the French had shown
anything like the same activity, or had established anything like
the same interests; and they were far behind their secular rivals.

But these facts bring out one feature which differentiated the
settlement of Africa from that of any other region of the non-
European world. It was not a gradual, but an extraordinarily rapid
achievement. It was based not upon claims established by work
already done, but, for the most part, upon the implicit assumption
that extra-European empire was the due of the European peoples,
simply because they were civilised and powerful. This was the
justification, in a large degree, of all the European empires in
Africa. But it was especially so in the case of the empire which
Germany created in the space of three years. This empire was not
the product of German enterprise in the regions included within
it; it was the product of Germany's dominating position in Europe,
and the expression of her resolve to create an external empire
worthy of that position.

Africa falls naturally into two great regions. The northern coast,
separated from the main mass of the continent by the broad belt of
deserts which runs from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, has always
been far more ultimately connected with the other Mediterranean
lands than with the rest of Africa. Throughout the course of
history, indeed, the northern coast-lands have belonged rather to
the realms of Western or of Asiatic civilisation than to the
primitive barbarism of the sons of Ham. In the days of the
Carthaginians and of the Roman Empire, all these lands, from Egypt
to Morocco, had known a high civilisation. They were racially as
well as historically distinct from the rest of the continent. They
had been in name part of the Turkish Empire, and any European
interference in their affairs was as much a question of European
politics as the problems of the Balkans. Two countries in this
area fell under European direction during the period with which we
are concerned, and in each case the effects upon European politics
were very great. In 1881 France, with the deliberate encouragement
of Bismarck, sent armies into Tunis, and assumed the protectorate
of that misgoverned region. She had good grounds for her action.
Not only had she large trade-interests in Tunis, but the country
was separated from her earlier dominion in Algeria only by an
artificial line, and its disorders increased the difficulty of
developing the efficient administration which she had established
there. Unhappily Italy also had interests in Tunis. There were
more Italian than French residents in the country, which is
separated from Sicily only by a narrow belt of sea. And Italy, who
was beginning to conceive colonial ambitions, had not unnaturally
marked down Tunis as her most obvious sphere of influence. The
result was to create a long-lived ill-feeling between the two
Latin countries. As a consequence of the annexation of Tunis,
Italy was persuaded in the next year (1882) to join the Triple
Alliance; and France, having burnt her fingers, became chary of
colonial adventures in regions that were directly under the eye of
Europe. Isolated, insecure, and eternally suspicious of Germany,
she could not afford to be drawn into European quarrels. This is
in a large degree the explanation of her vacillating action in
regard to Egypt.

In Egypt the political influence of France had been preponderant

ever since the time of Mehemet Ali; perhaps we should say, ever
since the time of Napoleon. And political influence had been
accompanied by trading and financial interests. France had a
larger share of the trade of Egypt, and had lent more money to the
ruling princes of the country, than any other country save
England. She had designed and executed the Suez Canal. But this
waterway, once opened, was used mainly by British ships on the way
to India, Australia, and the Far East. It became a point of vital
strategic importance to Britain, who, though she had opposed its
construction, eagerly seized the chance of buying a great block of
shares in the enterprise from the bankrupt Khedive. Thus French
and British interests in Egypt were equally great; greater than
those of all the rest of Europe put together. When the native
government of Egypt fell into bankruptcy (1876), the two powers
set up a sort of condominium, or joint control of the finances, in
order to ensure the payment of interest on the Egyptian debt held
by their citizens. To bankruptcy succeeded political chaos; and it
became apparent that if the rich land of Egypt was not to fall
into utter anarchy, there must be direct European intervention.
The two powers proposed to take joint action; the rest of Europe
assented. But the Sultan of Turkey, as suzerain of Egypt,
threatened to make difficulties. At the last moment France,
fearful of the complications that might result, and resolute to
avoid the danger of European war, withdrew from the project of
joint intervention. Britain went on alone; and although she hoped
and believed that she would quickly be able to restore order, and
thereupon to evacuate the country, found herself drawn into a
labour of reconstruction that could not be dropped. We shall in
the next chapter have more to say on the British occupation of
Egypt, as part of the British achievement during this period. In
the meanwhile, its immediate result was continuous friction
between France and Britain. France could not forgive herself or
Britain for the opportunity which she had lost. The embitterment
caused by the Egyptian question lasted throughout the period, and
was not healed till the Entente of 1904. It intensified and
exacerbated the rivalry of the two countries in other fields. It
made each country incapable of judging fairly the actions of the
other. To wounded and embittered France, the perfectly honest
British explanations of the reasons for delay in evacuating Egypt
seemed only so many evidences of hypocrisy masking greed. To
Britain the French attitude seemed fractious and unreasonable, and
she suspected in every French forward movement in other fields--
notably in the Eastern Soudan and the upper valley of the Nile--an
attempt to attack or undermine her. Thus Egypt, like Tunis,
illustrated the influence of European politics in the extra-
European field. The power that profited most was Germany, who had
strengthened herself by drawing Italy into the Triple Alliance,
and had kept France at her mercy by using colonial questions as a
means of alienating her from her natural friends. It was, in
truth, only from this point of view that colonial questions had
any interest for Bismarck. He was, as he repeatedly asserted
almost to the day of his death, 'no colony man.' But the time was
at hand when he was to be forced out of this attitude. For already
the riches of tropical Africa were beginning to attract the
attention of Europe.

The most active and energetic of the powers in tropical Africa was
France. From her ancient foothold at Senegal she was already, in
the late 'seventies, pushing inland towards the upper waters of
the Niger; while further south her vigorous explorer de Brazza was
penetrating the hinterland behind the French coastal settlements
north of the Congo mouth. Meanwhile the explorations of
Livingstone and Stanley had given the world some conception of the
wealth of the vast exterior. In 1876 Leopold, King of the
Belgians, summoned a conference at Brussels to consider the
possibility of setting the exploration and settlement of Africa
upon an international basis. Its result was the formation of an
International African Association, with branches in all the
principal countries. But from the first the branches dropped all
serious pretence of international action. They became (so far as
they exercised any influence) purely national organisations for
the purpose of acquiring the maximum amount of territory for their
own states. And the central body, after attempting a few
unsuccessful exploring expeditions, practically resolved itself
into the organ of King Leopold himself, and aimed at creating a
neutral state in Central Africa under his protection. In 1878 H.
M. Stanley returned from the exploration of the Congo. He was at
once invited by King Leopold to undertake the organisation of the
Congo basin for his Association, and set out again for that
purpose in 1879. But he soon found himself in conflict with the
active French agents under de Brazza, who had made their way into
the Congo valley from the north-west. And at the same time
Portugal, reviving ancient and dormant claims, asserted that the
Congo belonged to her. It was primarily to find a solution for
these disputes that the Berlin Conference was summoned in December
1884. Meanwhile the rush for territory was going on furiously in
other regions of Africa. Not only on the Congo, but on the Guinea
Coast and its hinterland, France was showing an immense activity,
and was threatening to reduce to small coastal enclaves the old
British settlements on this coast. Only the energy shown by a
group of British merchants, who formed themselves into a National
African Company in 1881, and the vigorous action of their leader,
Mr. (afterwards Sir) George Taubman Goldie, prevented the
extrusion of British interests from the greater part of the Niger
valley, where they had hitherto been supreme. In Madagascar, too,
the ancient ambitions of France had revived. Though British
trading and missionary activities in the island were at this date
probably greater than French, France claimed large rights,
especially in the north-east of the island. These claims drew her
into a war with the native power of the Hovas, which began in
1883, and ended in 1885 with a vague recognition of French
suzerainty. Again, Italy had, in 1883, obtained her first foothold
in Eritrea, on the shore of the Red Sea. And Germany, also, had
suddenly made up her mind to embark upon the career of empire. In
1883 the Bremen merchant, Luderitz, appeared in South-west Africa,
where there were a few German mission stations and trading-
centres, and annexed a large area which Bismarck was persuaded to
take under the formal protection of Germany. This region had
hitherto been vaguely regarded as within the British sphere, but
though native princes, missionaries, and in 1868 even the Prussian
government, had requested Britain to establish a formal
protectorate, she had always declined to do so. In the next year
another German agent, Dr. Nachtigal, was commissioned by the
German government to report on German trade interests on the West
Coast, and the British government was formally acquainted with his
mission and requested to instruct its agents to assist him. The
real purpose of the mission was shown when Nachtigal made a treaty
with the King of Togoland, on the Guinea Coast, whereby he
accepted German suzerainty. A week later a similar treaty was made
with some of the native chiefs in the Cameroons. In this region
British interests had hitherto been predominant, and the chiefs
had repeatedly asked for British protection, which had always been
refused. A little later the notorious Karl Peters, with a few
companions disguised as working engineers, arrived at Zanzibar on
the East Coast, with a commission from the German Colonial Society
to peg out German claims. In the island of Zanzibar British
interests had long been overwhelmingly predominant; and the
Sultan, who had large and vague claims to supremacy over a vast
extent of the mainland, had repeatedly asked the British
government to take these regions under its protectorate. He had
always been refused. Peters' luggage consisted largely of draft
treaty-forms; and he succeeded in making treaties with native
princes (usually unaware of the meaning of the documents they were
signing) whereby some 60,000 square miles were brought under
German control. The protectorate over these lands had not been
accepted by the German government when the Conference of Berlin
met. It was formally accepted in the next year (1885). Far from
being opposed by Britain, the establishment of German power in
East Africa was actually welcomed by the British government, whose
foreign secretary, Earl Granville, wrote that his government
'views with favour these schemes, the realisation of which will
entail the civilisation of large tracts over which hitherto no
European influence has been exercised.' And when a group of
British traders began to take action further north, in the
territory which later became British East Africa, and in which
Peters had done nothing, the British government actually consulted
the German government before licensing their action. Thus before
the meeting of the Conference of Berlin the foundations of the
German empire in Africa were already laid; the outlines of the
vast French empire in the north had begun to appear; and the
curious dominion of Leopold of Belgium in the Congo valley had
begun to take shape.

The Conference of Berlin (Dec. 1884-Feb. 1885), which marks the

close of the first stage in the partition of Africa, might have
achieved great things if it had endeavoured to lay down the
principles upon which European control over backward peoples
should be exercised. But it made no such ambitious attempt. It
prescribed the rules of the game of empire-building, ordaining
that all protectorates should be formally notified by the power
which assumed them to the other powers, and that no annexation
should be made of territory which was not 'effectively' occupied;
but evidently the phrase 'effective occupation' can be very laxly
interpreted. It provided that there should be free navigation of
the Congo and Niger rivers, and freedom of trade for alienations
within the Congo valley and certain other vaguely defined areas.
But it made no similar provision for other parts of Africa; and it
whittled away the value of what it did secure by the definite
proviso that should parts of these areas be annexed by independent
states, the restriction upon their control of trade should lapse.
It recognised the illegality of the slave-trade, and imposed upon
annexing powers the duty of helping to suppress it; this provision
was made much fuller and more definite by a second conference at
Brussels in 1890, on the demand of Britain, who had hitherto
contended almost alone against the traffic in human flesh. But no
attempt was made to define native rights, to safeguard native
customs, to prohibit the maintenance of forces larger than would
be necessary for the maintenance of order: in short, no attempt
was made to lay down the doctrine that the function of a ruling
power among backward peoples is that of a trustee on behalf of its
simple subjects and on behalf of civilisation. That the partition
of Africa should have been effected without open war, and that the
questions decided at Berlin should have been so easily and
peacefully agreed upon, seemed at the moment to be a good sign.
But the spirit which the conference expressed was not a healthy
spirit.

After 1884 the activity of the powers in exploration, annexation

and development became more furious than ever. Britain now began
seriously to arouse herself to the danger of exclusion from vast
areas where her interests had hitherto been predominant; and it
was during these years that all her main acquisitions of territory
in Africa were made: Rhodesia and Central Africa in the south,
East Africa and Somaliland in the East, Nigeria and the expansion
of her lesser protectorates in the West. To these years also
belonged the definite, and most unfortunate, emergence of Italy as
a colonising power. She had got a foothold in Eritrea in 1883; in
1885 it was, with British aid, enlarged by the annexation of
territory which had once been held by Egypt, but had been
abandoned when she lost the Soudan. But the Italian claims in
Eritrea brought on conflict with the neighbouring native power of
Abyssinia. In spite of a sharp defeat at Dogali in 1887, she
succeeded in holding her own in this conflict; and in 1889
Abyssinia accepted a treaty which Italy claimed to be a
recognition of her suzerainty. But the Abyssinians repudiated this
interpretation; and in a new war, which began in 1896, inflicted
upon the Italians so disastrous a defeat at Adowa that they were
constrained to admit the complete independence of Abyssinia--the
sole native state which has so far been able to hold its own
against the pressure of Europe. Meanwhile in 1889 and the
following years Italy had, once more with the direct concurrence
of Britain, marked out a new territory in Somaliland.

The main features of the years from 1884 to 1900 were the rapidity
with which the territories earlier annexed were expanded and
organised, more especially by France. In the 'nineties her
dominions extended from the Mediterranean to the Guinea Coast, and
she had conceived the ambition of extending them also across
Africa from West to East. This ambition led her into a new and
more acute conflict with Britain, who, having undertaken the
reconquest of the Egyptian Soudan and the upper valley of the
Nile, held that she could not permit a rival to occupy the upper
waters of the great river, or any part of the territory that
belonged to it. Hence when the intrepid explorer, Marchand, after
a toilsome expedition which lasted for two years, planted the
French flag at Fashoda in 1898, he was promptly disturbed by
Kitchener, fresh from the overthrow of the Khalifa and the
reconquest of Khartoum, and was compelled to withdraw. The tension
was severe; no episode in the partition of Africa had brought the
world so near to the outbreak of a European war. But in the end
the dispute was settled by the Anglo-French agreement of 1898,
which may be said to mark the conclusion of the process of
partition. It was the last important treaty in a long series which
filled the twenty years following 1878, and which had the result
of leaving Africa, with the exception of Morocco, Tripoli, and
Abyssinia, completely divided among the chief European states.
Africa was the main field of the ambitions and rivalries of the
European powers during this period; the other fields may be more
rapidly surveyed. In Central Asia and the Near East the main
features of the period were two. The first was the steady advance
of Russia towards the south-east, which awakened acute alarms in
Britain regarding India, and led to the adoption of a 'forward
policy' among the frontier tribes in the north-west of India. The
second was the gradual and silent penetration of Turkey by German
influence. Here there was no partition or annexation, But Germany
became the political protector of the Turk; undertook the
reorganisation of his armies; obtained great commercial
concessions; bought up his railways, ousting the earlier British
and French concerns which had controlled them, and built new
lines. The greatest of these was the vitally important project of
the Bagdad railway, which was taken in hand just before the close
of the period. It was a project whose political aims outweighed
its commercial aims. And it provided a warning of the gigantic
designs which Germany was beginning to work out. But as yet, in
1900, the magnitude of these designs was unperceived. And the
problems of the Middle East were not yet very disturbing. The
Turkish Empire remained intact; so did the Persian Empire, though
both were becoming more helpless, partly owing to the decrepitude
of their governments, partly owing to the pressure of European
financial and trading interests. As yet the empires of the Middle
East seemed to form a region comparatively free from European
influence. But this was only seeming. The influence of Europe was
at work in them; and it was probably inevitable that some degree
of European political tutelage should follow as the only means of
preventing the disintegration which must result from the pouring
of new wine into the old bottles.

In the Far East--in the vast empire of China--this result seemed

to be coming about inevitably and rapidly. The ancient pot-bound
civilisation of China had withstood the impact of the West in the
mid-nineteenth century without breaking down; but China had made
no attempt, such as Japan had triumphantly carried out, to adapt
herself to the new conditions, and her system was slowly crumbling
under the influence of the European traders, teachers, and
missionaries whom she had been compelled to admit. The first of
the powers to take advantage of this situation was France, who
already possessed a footing in Cochin-China, and was tempted
during the colonial enthusiasm of the 'eighties to transform it
into a general supremacy over Annam and Tonking. As early as 1874
she had obtained from the King of Annam a treaty which she
interpreted as giving her suzerain powers. The King of Annam
himself repudiated this interpretation, and maintained that he was
a vassal of China. China took the same view; and after long
negotiations a war between France and China broke out. It lasted
for four years, and demanded a large expenditure of strength. But
it ended (1885) with the formal recognition of French suzerainty
over Annam, and a further decline of Chinese prestige.

Ten years later a still more striking proof of Chinese weakness

was afforded by the rapid and complete defeat of the vast, ill-
organised empire by Japan, the youngest of the great powers. The
war gave to Japan Formosa and the Pescadores Islands, and added
her to the list of imperialist powers. She would have won more
still--the Liao-tang Peninsula and a sort of suzerainty over
Korea--but that the European powers, startled by the signs of
China's decay, and perhaps desiring a share of the plunder,
intervened to forbid these annexations, on the pretext of
defending the integrity of China. Russia, France and Germany
combined in this step; Britain stood aloof. Japan, unwillingly
giving way, and regarding Russia as the chief cause of her
humiliation, began to prepare herself for a coming conflict. As
for unhappy China, she was soon to learn how much sincerity there
was in the zeal of Europe for the maintenance of her integrity. In
1896 she was compelled to permit Russia to build a railway across
Manchuria; and to grant to France a 'rectification of frontiers'
on the south, and the right of building a railway through the
province of Yunnan, which lies next to Tonking. The partition of
China seemed to be at hand. Britain and America vainly urged upon
the other powers that China should be left free to direct her own
affairs subject to the maintenance of 'the open door' for European
trade. The other powers refused to listen, and in 1897 the
beginning of the end seemed to have come. Germany, seizing on the
pretext afforded by the murder of two German missionaries,
stretched forth her 'mailed fist,' and seized the strong place and
admirable harbour of Kiao-chau, the most valuable strategic
position on the Chinese coast. That she meant to use it as a base
for future expansion was shown by her lavish expenditure upon its
equipment and fortification. Russia responded by seizing the
strong place of Port Arthur and the Liao-Tang Peninsula, while
every day her hold upon the great province of Manchuria was
strengthened. Foreseeing a coming conflict in which her immense
trading interests would be imperilled, Britain acquired a naval
base on the Chinese coast by leasing Wei-hai-Wei. Thus all the
European rivals were clustered round the decaying body of China;
and in the last years of the century were already beginning to
claim 'spheres of influence,' despite the protests of Britain and
America. But the outburst of the Boxer Rising in 1900--caused
mainly by resentment of foreign intervention--had the effect of
postponing the rush for Chinese territory. And when Britain and
Japan made an alliance in 1902 on the basis of guaranteeing the
status quo in the East, the overwhelming naval strength of the two
allies made a European partition of China impracticable; and China
was once more given a breathing-space. Only Russia could attack
the Chinese Empire by land; and the severe defeat which she
suffered at the hands of Japan in 1904-5 removed that danger also.
The Far East was left with a chance of maintaining its
independence, and of voluntarily adapting itself to the needs of a
new age.

The last region in which territories remained available for

European annexation consisted of the innumerable archipelagoes of
the Pacific Ocean. Here the preponderant influence had been in the
hands of Britain ever since the days of Captain Cook. She had made
some annexations during the first three quarters of the century,
but had on the whole steadfastly refused the requests of many of
the island peoples to be taken under her protection. France had,
as we have seen, acquired New Caledonia and the Marquesas Islands
during the previous period, but her activity in this region was
never very great. The only other European power in possession of
Pacific territories was Spain, who held the great archipelago of
the Philippines, and claimed also the numerous minute islands
(nearly six hundred in number) which are known as Micronesia. When
the colonial enthusiasm of the 'eighties began, Germany saw a
fruitful field in the Pacific, and annexed the Bismarck
Archipelago and the north-eastern quarter of New Guinea. Under
pressure from Australia, who feared to see so formidable a
neighbour established so near her coastline, Britain annexed the
south-eastern quarter of that huge island. During the 'nineties
the partition of the Pacific Islands was completed; the chief
participators being Germany, Britain, and the United States of
America.

The entry of America into the race for imperial possessions in its
last phase was too striking an event to pass without comment.
America annexed Hawaii in 1898, and divided the Samoan group with
Germany in 1899. But her most notable departure from her
traditional policy of self-imposed isolation from world-politics
came when in 1898 she was drawn by the Cuban question into a war
with Spain. Its result was the disappearance of the last relics of
the Spanish Empire in the New World and in the Pacific. Cuba
became an independent republic. Porto Rico was annexed by America.
In the Pacific the Micronesian possessions of Spain were acquired
by Germany. Germany would fain have annexed also the Philippine
Islands. But America resolved herself to assume the task of
organising and governing these rich lands; and in doing so made a
grave breach with her traditions. Her new possession necessarily
drew her into closer relations with the problems of the Far East;
it gave her also some acquaintance with the difficulty of
introducing Western methods among a backward people. During these
years of universal imperialist excitement the spirit of
imperialism seemed to have captured America as it had captured the
European states; and this was expressed in a new interpretation of
the Monroe doctrine, put forth by the Secretary of State during
the Venezuela controversy of 1895. 'The United States,' said Mr.
Olney, 'is practically sovereign on this continent (meaning both
North and South America), 'and its fiat is law upon the subjects
to which it confines its interposition.' No such gigantic imperial
claim had ever been put forward by any European state; and it
constituted an almost defiant challenge to the imperialist powers
of Europe. It may safely be said that this dictum did not
represent the settled judgment of the American people. But it did
appear, in the last years of the century, as if the great republic
were about to emerge from her self-imposed isolation, and to take
her natural part in the task of planting the civilisation of the
West throughout the world. Had she frankly done so, had she made
it plain that she recognised the indissoluble unity and the common
interests of the whole world, it is possible that her influence
might have eased the troubles of the next period, and exercised a
deterrent influence upon the forces of disturbance which were
working towards the great catastrophe. But her traditions were too
strong; and after the brief imperialist excitement of the
'nineties, she gradually relapsed once more into something like
her old attitude of aloofness.

It is but a cursory and superficial view which we have been able

to take of this extraordinary quarter of a century, during which
almost the whole world was partitioned among a group of mighty
empires, and the political and economic unity of the globe was
finally and irrefragably established. Few regions had escaped the
direct political control of European powers; and most of these few
were insensibly falling under the influence of one or other of the
powers: Turkey under that of Germany, Persia under that of Russia
and Britain. No region of the earth remained exempt from the
indirect influence of the European system. The civilisation of the
West had completed the domination of the globe; and the interests
of the great world-states were so intertwined and intermingled in
every corner of the earth that the balance of power among them had
become as precarious as was the European balance in the eighteenth
century. The era of the world-states had very definitely opened.
It remained to be seen in what spirit it was to be used, and
whether it was to be of long duration. These two questions are
one; for no system can last which is based upon injustice and the
denial of right.

At this point we may well stop to survey the new world-states

which had been created by this quarter of a century of eager
competition.

First among them, in extent and importance, stood the new empire
of France. It covered a total area of five million square miles,
and in size ranked third in order, coming after the older empires
of Russia and Britain. It had been the result of the strenuous
labours of three-quarters of a century, dating from the first
invasion of Algiers; it included also some surviving fragments of
the earlier French Empire. But overwhelmingly the greater part of
this vast dominion had been acquired during the short period which
we have surveyed in this chapter; and its system of organisation
and government had not yet had time to establish itself. It had
been built only at the cost of strenuous labour, and many wars.
Yet the French had shown in its administration that they still
retained to the full that imaginative tact in the handling of
alien peoples which had stood them in good stead in India and
America during the eighteenth century. Once their rule was
established the French had on the whole very little trouble with
their subjects; and it is impossible to praise too highly the
labours of civilisation which French administrators were
achieving. So far as their subjects were concerned, they may
justly be said to have regarded themselves as trustees. So far as
the rest of the civilised world was concerned, the same praise
cannot be given; for the French policy in the economic
administration of colonies was definitely one of monopoly and
exclusion. The French Empire fell into three main blocks. First,
and most important, was the empire of Northern Africa, extending
from Algiers to the mouth of the Congo, and from the Atlantic to
the valley of the Nile. Next came the rich island of Madagascar;
lastly the eastern empire of Annam and Tonking, the beginnings of
which dated back to the eighteenth century. A few inconsiderable
islands in the Pacific and the West Indies, acquired long since, a
couple of towns in India, memories of the dreams of Dupleix, and
the province of French Guiana in South America, which dated back
to the seventeenth century, completed the list. For the most part
a recent and rapid creation, it nevertheless had roots in the
past, and was the work of a people experienced in the handling of
backward races.

Next may be named the curious dominion of the Congo Free State,
occupying the rich heart of the African continent. Nominally it
belonged to no European power, but was a recognised neutral
territory. In practice it was treated as the personal estate of
the Belgian king, Leopold II. Subject to closer international
restrictions than any other European domain in the non-European
world, the Congo was nevertheless the field of some of the worst
iniquities in the exploitation of defenceless natives that have
ever disgraced the record of European imperialism. International
regulations are no safeguard against misgovernment; the only real
sanction is the character and spirit of the government. For the
Congo iniquities Leopold II. must be held guilty at the bar of
posterity. When he went to his judgment in 1908 this rich realm
passed under the direct control of the Belgian government and
parliament, and an immediate improvement resulted.

The least successful of the new world-states was that of Italy.

Its story was a story of disaster and disappointment. It included
some two hundred thousand square miles of territory; but they were
hot and arid lands on the inhospitable shores of the Red Sea and
in Somaliland. Italy had as yet no real opportunity of showing how
she would deal with the responsibilities of empire.

The most remarkable, in many respects, of all these suddenly

acquired empires was that of Germany. For it was practically all
obtained within a period of three years, without fighting or even
serious friction. It fell almost wholly within regions where
Germany's interests had been previously negligible, and British
trade predominant. Yet its growth had not been impeded, it had
even been welcomed, by its rivals. This easily-won empire was
indeed relatively small, being not much over one million square
miles, little more than one-fifth of the French dominions. But it
was five times as large as Germany itself, and it included
territories which were, on the whole, richer than those of France.
The comparative smallness of its area was due to the fact that
Germany was actually the last to enter the race. She took no steps
to acquire territory, she showed no desire to acquire it, before
1883; if she had chosen to begin ten years earlier, as she might
easily have done, or if she had shown any marked activity in
exploring or missionary work, without doubt she could have
obtained a much larger share of African soil.

These rich lands afforded to their new masters useful supplies of

raw materials, which were capable of almost indefinite expansion.
They included, in East and South-West Africa, areas well suited
for white settlement; but German emigrants, despite every
encouragement, refused to settle in them. An elaborately
scientific system of administration, such as might be expected
from the German bureaucracy, was devised for the colonies;
officials and soldiers have from the beginning formed a larger
proportion of their white population than in any other European
possessions. Undoubtedly the government of the German colonies was
in many respects extremely efficient. But over-administration,
which has its defects even in an old and well-ordered country, is
fatal to the development of a raw and new one. Although Germany
has, in order to increase the prosperity of her colonies,
encouraged foreign trade, and followed a far less exclusive policy
than France, not one of her colonies, except the little West
African district of Togoland, has ever paid its own expenses. In
the first generation of its existence the German colonial empire,
small though it is in comparison with the British or the French,
actually cost the home government over 100,000,000 pounds in
direct outlay.

The main cause of this was that from the first the Germans showed
neither skill nor sympathy in the handling of their subject
populations. The uniformed official, with his book of rules, only
bewilders primitive folk, and arouses their resentment. But it was
not only official pedantry which caused trouble with the subject
peoples; still more it was the ruthless spirit of mere domination,
and the total disregard of native rights, which were displayed by
the German administration. The idea of trusteeship, which had
gradually established itself among the rulers of the British
dominions, and in the French colonies also, was totally lacking
among the Germans. They ruled their primitive subjects with the
brutal intolerance of Zabern, with the ruthless cruelty since
displayed in occupied Belgium. This was what made the rise of the
German dominion a terrible portent in the history of European
imperialism. The spirit of mere domination, regardless of the
rights of the conquered, had often shown itself in other European
empires; but it had always had to struggle against another and
better ideal, the ideal of trusteeship; and, as we have seen, the
better ideal had, during the nineteenth century, definitely got
the upper hand, especially in the British realms, whose experience
had been longest. But the old and bad spirit reigned without check
in the German realms. And even when, in 1907, it began to be
seriously criticised, when its disastrous and unprofitable results
began to be seen, the ground on which it was challenged in
discussions in Germany was mainly the materialist ground that it
did not pay.

The justification for these assertions is to be found in the

history of the principal German colonies. In the Cameroons the
native tribes, who had been so ready to receive European
government that they had repeatedly asked for British protection,
were driven to such incessant revolts that the annals of the
colony seem to be annals of continuous bloodshed: forty-six
punitive expeditions were chronicled in the seventeen years from
1891--long after the establishment of the German supremacy, which
took place in 1884. The record of East Africa was even more
terrible for the ferocity with which constant revolts were
suppressed. But worst of all was the story of South-West Africa.
There were endless wars against the various tribes; but they
culminated in the hideous Herero war of 1903-6. The Hereros,
driven to desperation by maltreatment, had revolted and killed
some white farmers. They were punished by an almost complete
annihilation. The spirit of this hideous slaughter is sufficiently
expressed by the proclamation of the governor, General von Trotha,
in 1904. 'The Herero people must now leave the land. Within the
German frontier every Herero, with or without weapon, with or
without cattle, will be shot. I shall take charge of no more women
and children, but shall drive them back to their people, or let
them be shot at.' Ten thousand of these unhappy people, mainly old
men, women and children, were driven into the desert, where they
perished. There is no such atrocious episode in the history of
European imperialism since Pizarro's slaughter of the Incas; if
even that can be compared with it.

The causes of these ceaseless and ruinous wars were to be found

partly in the total disregard of native custom, and in the hide-
bound pedantry with which German-made law and the Prussian system
of regimentation were enforced upon the natives; but it was to be
found still more in the assumption that the native had no rights
as against his white lord. His land might be confiscated; his
cattle driven away; even downright slavery was not unknown, not
merely in the form of forced labour, which has been common in
German colonies, but in the form of the actual sale and purchase
of negroes. Herr Dernburg, who became Colonial Secretary in 1907,
himself recorded that he met in East Africa a young farmer who
told him that he had just bought a hundred and fifty negroes; he
also described the settlers' pleasing practice of sitting beside
the wells with revolvers, in order to prevent the natives from
watering their cattle, and to force them to leave them behind; and
he noted that officials nearly always carried negro whips with
them. These practices, indeed, were condemned by the German
Government itself, but only after many years, and mainly because
they were wasteful. Government representatives have told the
Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue
a 'healthy egoism,' and forswear 'humanitarianism and irrational
sentimentality.' 'The Hereros must be forced to work, and to work
without compensation and for their food only. ... The sentiments
of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionaries work
must be repudiated with all energy.' This is what is called
Realpolitik.

Is it too much to say that the appearance of the spirit thus

expressed was a new thing in the history of European imperialism?
Is it not plain that if this spirit should triumph, the ascendancy
of Europe over the non-European world must prove to be, not a
blessing, but an unmitigated curse? Yet the nation which had thus
acquitted itself in the rich lands which it had so easily acquired
was not satisfied; it desired a wider field for the exhibition of
its Kultur, its conception of civilisation.

From the beginning it was evident that the colonial enthusiasts of

Germany had no intention of resting satisfied with the
considerable dominions they had won, but regarded them only as a
beginning, as bases for future conquests. The colonies were not
ends in themselves, but means for the acquisition of further
power; and it was this, even more than the ruthlessness with which
the subject peoples were treated, which made the growth of the
German dominions a terrible portent. For since the whole world was
now portioned out, new territories could only be acquired at the
cost of Germany's neighbours. This was, indeed, at first the
programme only of extremists; the mass of the German people, like
Bismarck, took little interest in colonies. But the extremists
proved that they could win over the government to their view; the
German people, most docile of nations, could be gradually
indoctrinated with it. And because this was so, because the ugly
spirit of domination and of unbridled aggressiveness was in these
years gradually mastering the ruling forces of a very powerful
state, and leading them towards the catastrophe which was to prove
the culmination of European imperialism, it is necessary to dwell,
at what may seem disproportionate length, upon the development of
German policy during the later years of our period.

Filled with pride in her own achievements, believing herself to

be, beyond all rivalry, the greatest nation in the world, already
the leader, and destined to be the controller, of civilisation,
Germany could not bring herself to accept a second place in the
imperial sphere. She had entered late into the field, by no fault
of her own, and found all the most desirable regions of the earth
already occupied. Now that 'world-power' had become the test of
greatness among states, she could be content with nothing short of
the first rank among world-states; if this rank could not be
achieved, she seemed to be sentenced to the same sort of fate as
had befallen Holland or Denmark: she might be ever so prosperous,
as these little states were, but she would be dwarfed by the vast
powers which surrounded her. But the German world-state was not to
be the result of a gradual and natural growth, like the Russian,
the British or the American world-states. The possibility of
gradual growth was excluded by the fact that the whole world had
been partitioned. Greatness in the non-European world must be, and
might be, carved out in a single generation, as supremacy in
Europe had been already attained, by the strong will, efficient
organisation, and military might of the German government.

It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that a nation with the history

of the German nation, with its ruling ideas, and with its
apparently well-tried confidence in the power of its government to
achieve its ends by force, should readily accept such a programme.
The date at which this programme captured the government of
Germany, and became the national policy, can be quite clearly
fixed: it was in 1890, when Bismarck, the 'no colony man,' was
driven from power, and the supreme direction of national affairs
fell into the hands of the Emperor William II. An impressionable,
domineering and magniloquent prince, inflated by the hereditary
self-assurance of the Hohenzollerns, and sharing to the full the
modern German belief in German superiority and in Germany's
imperial destiny, William II. became the spokesman and leader of
an almost insanely megalomaniac, but terribly formidable nation.
During the first decade of his government the new ambitions of
Germany were gradually formulated, and became more distinct. They
were not yet very apparent to the rest of the world, in spite of
the fact that they were expounded with vigour and emphasis in a
multitude of pamphlets and books. The world was even ready to
believe the Emperor's assertion that he was the friend of peace:
he half believed it himself, because he would have been very ready
to keep the peace if Germany's 'rights' could be attained without
war. But many episodes, such as Kiao-Chau, and the Philippines,
and the ceaseless warfare in the German colonies, and the restless
enterprises of Pan-German intrigue, provided a commentary upon
these pretensions which ought to have revealed the dangerous
spirit which was conquering the German people.

It is difficult, in the midst of a war forced upon the world by

German ambition, to take a sane and balanced view of the aims
which German policy was setting before itself during these years
of experiment and preparation. What did average German opinion
mean by the phrase Weltmacht, world-power, which had become one of
the commonplaces of its political discussions? We may safely
assume that by the mass of men the implications of the term were
never very clearly analysed; and that, if they had been
analysable, the results of the analysis would have been widely
different in 1890 and in 1914, except for a few fanatics and
extremists. Was the world-power at which Germany was aiming a real
supremacy over the whole world? In a vague way, no doubt,
important bodies of opinion held that such a supremacy was the
ultimate destiny of Germany in the more or less distant future;
and the existence of such a belief, however undefined, is
important because it helped to colour the attitude of the German
mind towards more immediately practical problems of national
policy. But as a programme to be immediately put into operation,
world-power was not conceived in this sense by any but a few Pan-
German fanatics; and even they would have recognised that of
course other states, and even other world-powers, would certainly
survive the most successful German war, though they would have to
submit (for their own good) to Germany's will. Again, did the
demand for world-power mean no more than that Germany must have
extra-European territories, like Britain or France? She already
possessed such territories, though on a smaller scale than her
rivals. Did the claim mean, then, that her dominions must be as
extensive and populous as (say) those of Britain? Such an aim
could only be obtained if she could succeed in overthrowing all
her rivals, at once or in succession. And if she did that, she
would then become, whatever her intentions, a world-power in the
first and all-embracing sense. It is probably true that the German
people, and even the extreme Pan-Germans, did not definitely or
consciously aim at world-supremacy. But they had in the back of
their minds the conviction that this was their ultimate destiny,
and in aiming at 'world-power' in a narrower sense, they so
defined their end as to make it impossible of achievement unless
the complete mastery of Europe (which, as things are, means the
mastery of most of the world) could be first attained. Certainly
the ruling statesmen of Germany must have been aware of the
implications of their doctrine of world-power. They were aware of
it in 1914, when they deliberately struck for the mastery of
Europe; they must have been aware of it in 1890, when they began
to lay numerous plans and projects in all parts of the world, such
as were bound to arouse the fears and suspicions of their rivals.

It is necessary to dwell for a little upon these plans and

projects of the decade 1890-1900, because they illustrate the
nature of the peril which was looming over an unconscious world.
It would be an error to suppose that all these schemes were
systematically and continuously pursued with the whole strength of
the German state. They appealed to different bodies of opinion.
Some of them were eagerly taken up for a time, and then allowed to
fall into the background, though seldom wholly dropped. But taken
as a whole they showed the existence of a restless and insatiable
ambition without very clearly defined aims, and an eagerness to
make use of every opening for the extension of power, which
constituted a very dangerous frame of mind in a nation so strong,
industrious, and persistent as the German nation.

In spite of the disappointing results of colonisation in Africa,

the German colonial enthusiasts hoped that something suitably
grandiose might yet be erected there: if the Belgian Congo could
somehow be acquired, and if the Portuguese would agree to sell
their large territories on the east and west coasts, a great
empire of Tropical Africa might be brought into being. This vision
has not been abandoned: it is the theme of many pamphlets
published during the course of the war, and if Germany were to be
able to impose her own terms, all the peoples of Central Africa
might yet hope to have extended to them the blessings of German
government as they have been displayed in the Cameroons and in the
South-West.
In the 'nineties there seemed also to be hope in South Africa,
where use might be made of the strained relations between Britain
and the Boer Republics. German South-West Africa formed a
convenient base for operations in this region: it was equipped
with a costly system of strategic railways, far more elaborate
than the commerce of the colony required. There is no doubt that
President Kruger was given reason to anticipate that he would
receive German help: in 1895 (before the Jameson Raid) Kruger
publicly proclaimed that the time had come 'to form ties of the
closest friendship between Germany and the Transvaal, ties such as
are natural between fathers and children'; in 1896 (after the
Jameson Raid) came the Emperor's telegram congratulating President
Kruger upon having repelled the invaders 'without recourse to the
aid of friendly powers'; in 1897 a formal treaty of friendship and
commerce was made between Germany and the Orange Free State, with
which the Transvaal had just concluded a treaty of perpetual
alliance. And meanwhile German munitions of war were pouring into
the Transvaal through Delagoa Bay. But when the crisis came,
Germany did nothing. She could not, because the British fleet
stood in the way.

South America, again, offered a very promising field. There were

many thousands of German settlers, especially in southern Brazil:
the Pan-German League assiduously laboured to organise these
settlers, and to fan their patriotic zeal, by means of schools,
books, and newspapers. But the Monroe Doctrine stood in the way of
South American annexations. Perhaps Germany might have been ready
to see how far she could go with the United States, the least
military of great powers. But there was good reason to suppose
that the British fleet would have to be reckoned with; and a
burglarious expedition to South America with that formidable
watchdog at large and unmuzzled was an uninviting prospect.

In the Far East the prospects of immediate advance seemed more

favourable, since the Chinese Empire appeared to be breaking up.
The seizure of Kiao-chau in 1897 was a hopeful beginning. But the
Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902 formed a serious obstacle to any
vigorous forward policy in this region. Once more the British
fleet loomed up as a barrier.

Yet another dream, often referred to by the pamphleteers though

never brought to overt action by the government, was the dream
that the rich empire of the Dutch in the Malay Archipelago should
be acquired by Germany. Holland herself, according to all the
political ethnologists of the Pan-German League, ought to be part
of the German Empire; and if so, her external dominions would
follow the destiny of the ruling state. But this was a prospect to
be talked about, not to be worked for openly. It would naturally
follow from a successful European war.

A more immediately practicable field of operations was to be found

in the Turkish Empire. It was here that the most systematic
endeavours were made during this period: the Berlin-Bagdad scheme,
which was to be the keystone of the arch of German world-power,
had already taken shape before our period closed, though the rest
of the world was strangely blind to its significance. Abstractly
regarded, a German dominion over the wasted and misgoverned lands
of the Turkish Empire would have meant a real advance of
civilisation, and would have been no more unjustifiable than the
British control of Egypt or India. This feeling perhaps explained
the acquiescence with which the establishment of German influence
in Turkey was accepted by most of the powers. They had yet to
realise that it was not pursued as an end in itself, but as a
means to further domination.

But neither the great Berlin-Bagdad project, nor any of the other
dreams and visions, had been definitely put into operation during
the decade 1890-1900. Germany was as yet feeling the way,
preparing the ground, and building up her resources both military
and industrial. Perhaps the main result which emerged from the
tentative experiments of these years was that at every point the
obstacle was the sprawling British Empire, and the too-powerful
British fleet. The conviction grew that the overthrow of this fat
and top-heavy colossus was the necessary preliminary to the
creation of the German world-state.

This was a doctrine which had long been preached by the chief
political mentor of modern Germany, Treitschke, who died in 1896.
He was never tired of declaring that Britain was a decadent and
degenerate state, that her empire was an unreal empire, and that
it would collapse before the first serious attack. It would break
up because it was not based upon force, because it lacked
organisation, because it was a medley of disconnected and
discordant fragments, worshipping an undisciplined freedom. That
it should ever have come into being was one of the paradoxes of
history; for it was manifestly not due to straightforward brute
force, like the German Empire; and the modern German mind could
not understand a state which did not rest upon power, but upon
consent, which had not been built up, like Prussia, by the
deliberate action of government, but which had grown almost at
haphazard, through the spontaneous activity of free and self-
governing citizens. Treitschke and his disciples could only
explain the paradox by assuming that since it had not been created
by force, it must have been created by low cunning; and they
invented the theory that British statesmen had for centuries
pursued an undeviating and Machiavellian policy of keeping the
more virile states of Europe at cross-purposes with one another by
means of the cunning device called the Balance of Power, while
behind the backs of these tricked and childlike nations Britain
was meanly snapping up all the most desirable regions of the
earth. According to this view it was in some mysterious way
Britain's fault that France and Germany were not the best of
friends, and that Russia had been alienated from her ancient ally.
But the day of reckoning would come when these mean devices would
no longer avail, and the pampered, selfish, and overgrown colossus
would find herself faced by hard-trained and finely tempered
Germany, clad in her shining armour. Then, at the first shock,
India would revolt; and the Dutch of South Africa would welcome
their German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain
had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would
ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of
subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to
pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all
her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon
Force and System and upon 'a healthy egoism,' not upon 'irrational
sentimentalities' about freedom and justice.
These were the doctrines and calculations of Realpolitik. They
were becoming more and more prevalent in the 'nineties. They seem
definitely to have got the upper hand in the direction of national
policy during the last years of the century, when Germany refused
to consider the projects of disarmament put forward at the Hague
in 1899, when the creation of the German navy was begun by the
Navy Acts of 1898 and 1900, and when the Emperor announced that
the future of Germany lay upon the water, and that hers must be
the admiralty of the Atlantic. At the moment when the conquest of
the world by European civilisation was almost complete, two
conceptions of the meaning of empire, the conception of brutal
domination pursued for its own sake, which has never been more
clearly displayed than in the administration of the German
colonies, and the conception of trusteeship, which had slowly
emerged during the long development of the British Empire, stood
forth already in sharp antithesis.

The dreadful anticipation of coming conflict weighed upon the

world. France, still suffering from the wounds of 1870, was always
aware of it. Russia, threatened by German policy in the Balkans,
was more and more clearly realising it. But Britain was
extraordinarily slow to awaken to the menace. As late as 1898 Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain was advocating an alliance between Britain,
Germany, and America to maintain the peace of the world; and Cecil
Rhodes, when he devised his plan for turning Oxford into the
training-ground of British youth from all the free nations of the
empire, found a place in his scheme for German as well as for
American students. The telegram to President Kruger in 1896 caused
only a passing sensation. The first real illumination came with
the extraordinary display of German venom against Britain during
the South African war, and with the ominous doubling of the German
naval programme adopted in the midst of that war, in 1900. But
even this made no profound impression. The majority of the British
people declined to believe that a 'great and friendly nation,' or
its rulers, could deliberately enter upon a scheme of such
unbridled ambition and of such unprovoked aggression.

VIII

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AMID THE WORLD-POWERS, 1878-1914

Throughout the period of rivalry for world-power which began in

1878 the British Empire had continued to grow in extent, and to
undergo a steady change in its character and organisation.

In the partition of Africa, Britain, in spite of the already

immense extent of her domains, obtained an astonishingly large
share. The protectorates of British East Africa, Uganda, Nigeria,
Nyasaland, and Somaliland gave her nearly 25,000,000 new negro
subjects, and these, added to her older settlements of Sierra
Leone and the Gold Coast, whose area was now extended, outnumbered
the whole population of the French African empire. But besides
these tropical territories she acquired control over two African
regions so important that they deserve separate treatment: Egypt,
on the one hand, and the various extensions of her South African
territories on the other. When the partition of Africa was
completed, the total share of Britain amounted to 3,500,000 square
miles, with a population of over 50,000,000 souls, and it included
the best regions of the continent: the British Empire, in Africa
alone, was more than three times as large as the colonial empire
of Germany, which was almost limited to Africa.

It may well be asked why an empire already so large should have

taken also the giant's share of the last continent available for
division among the powers of Europe. No doubt this was in part due
to the sentiment of imperialism, which was stronger in Britain
during this period than ever before. But there were other and more
powerful causes. In the first place, during the period 1815-78
British influence and trade had been established in almost every
part of Africa save the central ulterior, and no power had such
definite relations with various native tribes, many of which
desired to come under the protectorate of a power with whom the
protection of native rights and customs was an established
principle. In the second place, Britain was the only country which
already possessed in Africa colonies inhabited by enterprising
European settlers, and the activity of these settlers played a
considerable part in the extension of the British African
dominions. And in the third place, since the continental powers
had adopted the policy of fiscal protection, the annexation of a
region by any of them meant that the trade of other nations might
be restricted or excluded; the annexation of a territory by
Britain meant that it would be open freely and on equal terms to
the trade of all nations. For this reason the trading interests in
Britain, faced by the possibility of exclusion from large areas
with which they had carried on traffic, were naturally anxious
that as much territory as possible should be brought under British
supremacy, in order that it might remain open to their trade.

It is the main justification for British annexations that they

opened and developed new markets for all the world, instead of
closing them; and it was this fact chiefly which made the
acquisition of such vast areas tolerable to the other trading
powers. The extension of the British Empire was thus actually a
benefit to all the non-imperial states, especially to such active
trading countries as Italy, Holland, Scandinavia, or America. If
at any time Britain should reverse her traditional policy, and
reserve for her own merchants the trade of the immense areas which
have been brought under her control, nothing is more certain than
that the world would protest, and protest with reason, against the
exorbitant and disproportionate share which has fallen to her.
Only so long as British control means the open door for all the
world will the immense extent of these acquisitions continue to be
accepted without protest by the rest of the world.

In the new protectorates of this period Britain found herself

faced by a task with which she had never had to deal on so
gigantic a scale, though she had a greater experience in it than
any other nation: the task of governing justly whole populations
of backward races, among whom white men could not permanently
dwell, and whom they visited only for the purposes of commercial
exploitation. The demands of industry for the raw materials of
these countries involved the employment of labour on a very large
scale; but the native disliked unfamiliar toil, and as his wants
were very few, could easily earn enough to keep him in the
idleness he loved. Slavery was the customary mode of getting
uncongenial tasks performed in Africa; but against slavery
European civilisation had set its face. Again, the ancient
unvarying customs whereby the rights and duties of individual
tribesmen were enforced, and the primitive societies held
together, were often inconsistent with Western ideas, and tended
to break down altogether on contact with Western industrial
methods. How were the needs of industry to be reconciled with
justice to the subject peoples? How were their customs to be
reconciled with the legal ideas of their new masters? How were
these simple folk to be taught the habits of labour? How were the
resources of their land to be developed without interference with
their rights of property and with the traditional usages arising
from them? These were problems of extreme difficulty, which faced
the rulers of all the new European empires. The attempt to solve
them in a high-handed way, and with a view solely to the interests
of the ruling race, led to many evils: it produced the atrocities
of the Congo; it produced in the German colonies the practical
revival of slavery, the total disregard of native customs, and the
horrible sequence of wars and slaughters of which we have already
spoken. In the British dominions a long tradition and a long
experience saved the subject peoples from these iniquities. We
dare not claim that there were no abuses in the British lands; but
at least it can be claimed that government has always held it to
be its duty to safeguard native rights, and to prevent the total
break-up of the tribal system which could alone hold these
communities together. The problem was not fully solved; perhaps it
is insoluble. But at least the native populations were not driven
to despair, and were generally able to feel that they were justly
treated. 'Let me tell you,' a Herero is recorded to have written
from British South Africa to his kinsmen under German rule, 'Let
me tell you that the land of the English is a good land, since
there is no ill-treatment. White and black stand on the same
level. There is much work and much money, and your overseer does
not beat you, or if he does he breaks the law and is punished.'
There was a very striking contrast between the steady peace which
has on the whole reigned in all the British dominions, and the
incessant warfare which forms the history of the German colonies.
The tradition of protection of native rights, established during
the period 1815-78, and the experience then acquired, stood the
British in good stead. During the ordeal of the Great War it has
been noteworthy that there has been no serious revolt among these
recently conquered subjects; and one of the most touching features
of the war has been the eagerness of chiefs and their peoples to
help the protecting power, and the innumerable humble gifts which
they have spontaneously offered. Much remains to be done before a
perfect solution is found for the problems of these dominions of
yesterday. But it may justly be claimed that trusteeship, not
domination, has been the spirit in which they have been
administered; and that this is recognised by their subjects,
despite all the mistakes and defects to which all human
governments must be liable in dealing with a problem so complex.

Administrative problems of a yet more complex kind were raised in

the two greatest acquisitions of territory made by Britain during
these years, in Egypt and the Soudan, and in South Africa. The
events connected with these two regions have aroused greater
controversy than those connected with any other British dominions;
the results of these events have been more striking, and in
different ways more instructive as to the spirit and methods of
British imperialism, than those displayed in almost any other
field; and for these reasons we shall not hesitate to dwell upon
them at some length.

The establishment of British control over Egypt was due to the

most curious chain of unforeseen and unexpected events which even
the records of the British Empire contain. Nominally a part of the
Turkish Empire, Egypt had been in fact a practically independent
state, paying only a small fixed tribute to the Sultan, ever since
the remarkable Albanian adventurer, Mehemet Ali, had established
himself as its Pasha in the confusion following the French
occupation (1806). Mehemet Ali had been an extraordinarily
enterprising prince. He had created a formidable army, had
conquered the great desert province of the Soudan and founded its
capital, Khartoum, and had nearly succeeded in overthrowing the
Turkish Empire and establishing his own power in its stead: during
the period 1825-40 he had played a leading role in European
politics. Though quite illiterate, he had posed as the introducer
of Western civilisation into Egypt; but his grandiose and
expensive policy had imposed terrible burdens upon the fellahin
(peasantry), and the heavy taxation which was necessary to
maintain his armies and the spurious civilisation of his capital
was only raised by cruel oppressions.

The tradition of lavish expenditure, met by grinding the

peasantry, was accentuated by Mehemet's successors. It inevitably
impoverished the country. Large loans were raised in the West, to
meet increasing deficits; and the European creditors in course of
time found it necessary to insist that specific revenues should be
ear-marked as a security for their interest, and to claim powers
of supervision over finance. The construction of the Suez Canal
(opened 1869), which was due to the enterprise of the French,
promised to bring increased prosperity to Egypt; but in the
meanwhile it involved an immense outlay. At the beginning of our
period Egypt was already on the verge of bankruptcy, and the
Khedive was compelled to sell his holding of Suez Canal shares,
which were shrewdly acquired for Britain by Disraeli.

But financial chaos was not the only evil from which Egypt
suffered. There was administrative chaos also, and this was not
diminished by the special jurisdictions which had been allowed to
the various groups of Europeans settled in the country. The army,
unpaid and undisciplined, was ready to revolt; and above all, the
helpless mass of the peasantry were reduced to the last degree of
penury, and exposed to the merciless and arbitrary severity of the
officials, who fleeced them of their property under the lash. All
the trading nations were affected by this state of anarchy in an
important centre of trade; all the creditors of the Egyptian debt
observed it with alarm. But the two powers most concerned were
France and Britain, which between them held most of the debt, and
conducted most of the foreign trade, of Egypt; while to Britain
Egypt had become supremely important, since it now controlled the
main avenue of approach to India.

When a successful military revolt, led by Arabi Pasha, threatened

to complete the disorganisation of the country (1882), France and
Britain decided that they ought to intervene to restore order, the
other powers all agreeing. But at the last moment France withdrew,
and the task was undertaken by Britain single-handed. [Footnote:
See above, p. 164] In a short campaign Arabi was overthrown; and
now Britain had to address herself to the task of reconstructing
the political and economic organisation of Egypt. It was her hope
and intention that the work should be done as rapidly as possible,
in order that she might be able to withdraw from a difficult and
thankless task, which brought her into very delicate relations
with the other powers interested in Egypt. But withdrawal was not
easy. The task of reorganisation proved to be a much larger and
more complicated one than had been anticipated; and it was greatly
increased when the strange wave of religious fanaticism aroused by
the preaching of the Mahdi swept over the Soudan, raised a great
upheaval, and led to the destruction of the Egyptian armies of
occupation. Britain had now to decide whether the revolting
province should be reconquered or abandoned. Reconquest could not
be effected by the utterly disorganised Egyptian army; if it was
to be attempted, it must be by means of British troops. But this
would not only mean a profitless expenditure, it would also
indefinitely prolong the British occupation, which Britain was
desirous of bringing to an end at the earliest possible moment.

The romantic hero, Gordon, was therefore sent to Khartoum to carry

out the withdrawal from the Soudan of all the remaining Egyptian
garrisons. On his arrival he came to the conclusion that the
position was not untenable, and took no steps to evacuate. There
was much dangerous delay and vacillation; and in the end Gordon
was besieged in Khartoum, and killed by the bands of the Mahdi,
before a relief force could reach him. But this triumph of Mahdism
increased its menace to Egypt. The country could not be left to
its own resources until this peril had been removed, or until the
Egyptian army had been fully reorganised. So the occupation
prolonged itself, year after year.

The situation was, in fact, utterly anomalous. Egypt was a

province of Turkey, ruled by a semi-independent Khedive. Britain's
chief agent in the country was in form only in the position of a
diplomatic representative. But the very existence of the country
depended upon the British army of occupation, and upon the work of
the British officers who were reconstructing the Egyptian army.
And its hope of future stability depended upon the work of the
British administrators, financiers, jurists, and engineers who
were labouring to set its affairs in order. These officials, with
Sir Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) at their head, had an
extraordinarily difficult task to perform. Their relations with
the native government, which they constantly had to overrule, were
difficult enough. But besides this, they had to deal with the
agents of the other European powers, who, as representing the
European creditors of the Egyptian debt, had the right to
interfere in practically all financial questions, and could make
any logical financial reorganisation, and any free use of the
country's financial resources for the restoration of its
prosperity, all but impossible.
Yet in the space of a very few years an amazing work of
restoration and reorganisation was achieved. Financial stability
was re-established, while at the same time taxation was reduced.
The forced labour which had been exacted from the peasantry was
abolished; they were no longer robbed of their property under the
lash; they obtained a secure tenure in their land; and they found
that its productive power was increased, by means of great schemes
of irrigation. An impartial system of justice was organised--for
the first time in all the long history of Egypt since the fall of
the Roman Empire. The army was remodelled by British officers.
Schools of lower and higher grade were established in large
numbers. In short, Egypt began to assume the aspect of a
prosperous and well-organised modern community. And all this was
the work, in the main, of some fifteen years.

Meanwhile in the Soudan triumphant barbarism had produced an

appalling state of things. It is impossible to exaggerate the
hideousness of the regime of Mahdism. A ferocious tyranny
terrorised and reduced to desolation the whole of the upper basin
of the Nile; and the population is said to have shrunk from
12,000,000 to 2,000,000, although exact figures are of course
unattainable. One of the evil consequences of this regime was that
it prevented a scientific treatment of the flow of the Nile, on
which the very life of Egypt depended. Scientific irrigation had
already worked wonders in increasing the productivity of Egypt,
but to complete this work, and to secure avoidance of the famines
which follow any deficiency in the Nile-flow, it was necessary to
deal with the upper waters of the great river. On this ground, and
in order to remove the danger of a return of barbarism, which was
threatened by frequent Mahdist attacks, and finally in order to
rescue captives who were enduring terrible sufferings in the hands
of the Mahdi, it appeared that the reconquest of the Soudan must
be undertaken as the inevitable sequel to the reorganisation of
Egypt. It was achieved, with a wonderful efficiency which made the
name of Kitchener famous, in the campaigns of 1896-98. The
reconquered province was nominally placed under the joint
administration of Britain and Egypt; but in fact the very
remarkable work of civilisation which was carried out in it during
the years preceding the Great War was wholly directed by British
agents and officers.

The occupation of the Soudan necessitated a prolongation of the

British occupation of Egypt. But, indeed, such a prolongation was
in any case inevitable; for the beneficial reforms in justice,
administration, finance, and the organisation of the country's
resources, which had been effected in half a generation, required
to be carefully watched and nursed until they should be securely
rooted: to a certainty they would have collapsed if the
guardianship of Britain had been suddenly and completely
withdrawn. The growing prosperity of Egypt, however, and still
more the diffusion of Western education among its people, has
naturally brought into existence a nationalist party, who resent
what they feel to be a foreign dominance in their country, and
aspire after the institutions of Western self-government. But it
has to be noted that the classes among whom this movement has
sprung up are not the classes who form the bulk of the population
of Egypt--the fellahin, who from the time of the Pharaohs
downwards have been exploited and oppressed by every successive
conqueror who has imposed his rule on the country. This class,
which has profited more than any other from the British regime,
which has, under that regime, known for the first time justice,
freedom from tyranny, and the opportunity of enjoying a fair share
of the fruits of its own labour, is as yet unvocal. Accustomed
through centuries to submission, accepting good or bad seasons,
just or unjust masters, as the gods may send them, the fellah has
not yet had time even to begin to have thoughts or opinions about
his place in society and his right to a share in the control of
his own destinies; and if the rule which has endeavoured to
nurture him into prosperity and self-reliance were withdrawn, he
would accept with blind submissiveness whatever might take its
place. The classes among whom the nationalist movement finds its
strength are the classes which have been in the past accustomed to
enjoy some degree of domination; the relics of the conquering
races, Arabs or Turks, who have succeeded one another in the rule
of Egypt, the small traders and shopkeepers of the towns, drawn
from many different races, the students who have been influenced
by the knowledge and the political ideas of the West. It is
natural and healthy that a desire to share in the government of
their country should grow up among these classes: it is in some
degree a proof that the influence of the regime under which they
live has been stimulating. But it is also obvious that if these
classes were at once to reassume, under parliamentary forms, the
dominance which they wielded so disastrously until thirty years
ago, the result must be unhappy. They are being, under British
guidance, gradually introduced to a share in public affairs. But
the establishment of a system of full self-government and national
independence in Egypt, if it is to be successful, must wait until
not only these classes, but also the classes beneath them, have
been habituated to the sense of self-respect and of civic
obligation by a longer acquaintance with the working of the Reign
of Law.

Since the Great War broke out, the British position in Egypt has
been regularised by the proclamation of a formal British
protectorate. Perhaps the happiest fate which can befall the
country is that it should make that gradual progress in political
freedom, which is alone lasting, under the guidance of the power
which has already given it prosperity, the ascendancy of an
impartial law, freedom from arbitrary authority, freedom of speech
and thought, and emancipation from the thraldom of foreign
financial interests; and in the end it may possibly be the destiny
of this ancient land, after so many vicissitudes, to take its
place as one among a partnership of free nations in a world-
encircling British Commonwealth of self-governing peoples.

The most vexed, difficult, and critical problems in the history of

the British Empire since 1878--perhaps the most difficult in the
whole course of its history--have been those connected with the
South African colonies. In 1878 there were four distinct European
provinces in South Africa, besides protected native areas, like
Basutoland. All four had sprung from the original Anglo-Dutch
colony of the Cape of Good Hope. In two of them--Cape Colony and
Natal--the two European peoples, British and Dutch, dwelt side by
side, the Dutch being in a majority in the former, the British in
the latter; but in both the difficulty of their relationship was
complicated by the presence of large coloured populations, which
included not only the native African peoples, Hottentots, Kaffirs,
Zulus, and so forth, but also a large number of Asiatics, Malays
who had been brought in by the Dutch before the British conquest,
and Indians who had begun to come in more recently in large
numbers, especially to Natal. Difference of attitude towards these
peoples between the British authorities and the Dutch settlers had
been in the past, as we have seen, a main cause of friction
between the two European peoples, and had caused the long
postponement of full self-government. In the other two provinces,
the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the white inhabitants
were, in 1878, almost exclusively Dutch. The native populations in
these states were no longer in a state of formal slavery, but they
were treated as definitely subject and inferior peoples: a law of
the Transvaal laid it down that 'there shall be no equality in
Church or State between white and black.' Thus the mutual distrust
originally aroused by the native question still survived. It was
intensified by ill-feeling between the Boers and British
missionaries. When Livingstone, the British missionary hero,
reported the difficulties which the Boers had put in his way,
British opinion was made more hostile than ever. Of the two Boer
republics, the Orange Free State had enjoyed complete independence
since 1854; and no serious friction ever arose between it and the
British government. But the Transvaal, which had been turbulent
and restless from the first, had been annexed in 1878, largely
because it seemed to be drifting into a war of extermination with
the Zulus. As a consequence, Britain was drawn into a badly
managed Zulu-War; and when this dangerous tribe had been
conquered, the Transvaal revolted. The Boers defeated a small
British force at Majuba; whereupon, instead of pursuing the
struggle, the British government resolved to try the effect of
magnanimity, and conceded (1881 and 1884) full local independence
to the Transvaal, subject only to a vague recognition of British
suzerainty.

This was the beginning of many ills. The Transvaal Boers, knowing
little of the world, thought they had defeated Britain; and under
the lead of Paul Kruger, a shrewd old farmer who henceforth
directed their policy with all but autocratic power, began to
pursue the aim of creating a purely Dutch South Africa, and of
driving the British into the sea. Kruger's policy was one of pure
racial dominance, not of equality of rights. It was a natural aim,
under all the conditions. But it was the source of grave evils.
Inevitably it stimulated a parallel movement in Cape Colony, where
Dutch and British were learning to live peaceably together. The
Boer extremists also began to look about for allies, and were
tempted to hope for aid from Germany, who had just established
herself in South-West Africa. Full of pride, the Transvaalers,
though they already held a great and rich country which was very
thinly peopled, began to push outwards, and especially to threaten
the native tribes in the barren region of Bechuanaland, which lay
between the Transvaal and the German territory. To this Britain
replied by establishing a protectorate over Bechuanaland (1884) at
the request of native chiefs: the motive of this annexation was,
not suspicion of Germany, for this suspicion did not yet exist,
but the desire to protect the native population.

Kruger's vague project of a Dutch South Africa would probably have

caused little anxiety so long as his resources were limited to the
strength of the thinly scattered Boer farmers. But the situation
was fundamentally altered by the discovery of immense deposits
first of diamonds and then of gold in South Africa, and most
richly of all in the Rand district of the Transvaal. These
discoveries brought a rapid inrush of European miners, financiers,
and their miscellaneous camp-followers, and in a few years a very
rich and populous European community had established itself in the
Transvaal, and had created as its centre the mushroom new city of
Johannesburg (founded 1884). These immigrants, who came from many
countries, but especially from Britain, changed the situation in
the Transvaal; it seemed as though the majority among the white
men in that state would soon be British.

A simple and primitive organisation of government, such as

sufficed for the needs of Boer farmers, was manifestly inadequate
for the needs of the new population, which included, in the nature
of things, many undesirable elements; and it was natural that the
mining population should desire to be brought under a more modern
type of government, or to obtain an effective share in the control
of their own affairs. But this was precisely what the Boers of
Kruger's way of thinking were determined to refuse them. They were
resolved that Boer ascendancy in the Transvaal should not be
weakened. They therefore denied to the new immigrants all the
rights of citizenship, and would not even permit them to manage
the local affairs of Johannesburg. At the same time Kruger imposed
heavy taxation upon the gold industry and the people who conducted
it; and out of the proceeds he was able not only to pay the
expenses of government without burdening the Boer farmers, but to
build up the military power by means of which he hoped ultimately
to carry out his great project. Thus the 'Uitlanders' found
themselves treated as an inferior race in the land which their
industry was enriching. They practically paid the cost of the
government, but had no share in directing it.

The policy of racial ascendancy has seldom been pursued in a more

mischievous or dangerous form. One cannot but feel a certain
sympathy with the Boers' desire to maintain Boer ascendancy in the
land which they had conquered. Yet it must be remembered that they
were themselves very recent immigrants: the whole settlement of
the Transvaal had taken place in Paul Kruger's lifetime.

The diamonds and the gold of the recent discoveries had produced
in South Africa a new element of power: the power of great wealth,
wielded by a small number of men. Some of these were, of course,
mean and sordid souls, to whom wealth was an end in itself. But
among them one emerged who was more than a millionaire, who was
capable of dreaming great dreams, and had acquired his wealth
chiefly in order that he might have the power to realise them.
This was Cecil Rhodes, an almost unique combination of the
financier and the idealist. If he was sometimes tempted to resort
to the questionable devices that high finance seems to cultivate,
and if his ideals took on sometimes a rather vulgar colour,
reflected from his money-bags, nevertheless ideals were the real
governing factors in his life.

He dreamed of a great united state of South Africa; it was to be a

British South Africa; but it was to be British, not in the sense
in which Kruger wished it to be Dutch, but in the sense that
equality of treatment between the white races should exist within
it, as in all the British lands. He dreamed also of a great
brotherhood of British communities, or communities governed by
British ideals, girdling the world, perhaps dominating it (for
Rhodes was inclined to be a chauvinist), and leading it to peace
and liberty. As a lad fresh from Oxford, in long journeyings over
the African veldt, he had in a curious, childlike way thought out
a theology, a system of politics, and a mode of life for himself;
having reached the conclusion that the British race had on the
whole more capacity for leading the world successfully than any
other, he had resolved that it should be his life's business to
forward and increase the influence of British ideas and of British
modes of life; and he had systematically built up a colossal
fortune in order that he might have the means to do this work. At
the roots of this strange medley of poetry and chauvinism which
filled his mind was an unchanging and deep veneration for the
outstanding memory of his youth, Oxford, which in his mind stood
for all the august venerable past of England, and was the
expression of her moral essence. When he died, after a life of
money-making and intrigue, in a remote and half-developed colony,
it was found that most of his immense fortune had been left either
to enrich the college where he had spent a short time as a lad, or
to bring picked youths from all the British lands, and from what
he regarded as the two great sister communities of America and
Germany, so that they might drink in the spirit of England, at
Oxford, its sanctuary.

His immediate task lay in South Africa, where, from the moment of
his entry upon public life, he became the leader of the British
cause as Kruger was the leader of the Dutch: millionaire-dreamer
and shrewd, obstinate farmer, they form a strange contrast. The
one stood for South African unity based upon equality of the white
races: the other also for unity, but for unity based upon the
ascendancy of one of the white races. In the politics of Cape
Colony Rhodes achieved a remarkable success: he made friends with
the Dutch party and its leader Hofmeyr, who for a long time gave
steady support to his schemes and maintained him in the
premiership. It was a good beginning for the policy of racial co-
operation. But Rhodes's most remarkable achievement was the
acquisition of the fertile upland regions of Mashonaland and
Matabililand, now called Rhodesia in his honour. There were
episodes which smelt of the shady practices of high finance in the
events which led up to this acquisition. But in the result its
settlement was well organised, after some initial difficulties, by
the Chartered Company which Rhodes formed for the purpose. Now one
important result of the acquisition of Rhodesia was that it hemmed
in the Transvaal on the north; and, joined with the earlier
annexation of Bechuanaland, isolated and insulated the two Dutch
republics, which were now surrounded, everywhere except on the
east, by British territory. From Cape Town up through Bechuanaland
and through the new territories Rhodes drove a long railway line.
It was a business enterprise, but for him it was also a great
imaginative conception, a link of empire, and he dreamed of the
day when it should be continued to join the line which was being
pushed up the Nile from Cairo through the hot sands of the Soudan.

But Rhodes's final and most unhappy venture was the attempt to
force, by violent means, a solution of the Transvaal problem. He
hoped that the Uitlanders might be able, by a revolution, to
overthrow Kruger's government, and, perhaps in conjunction with
the more moderate Boers, to set up a system of equal treatment
which would make co-operation with the other British colonies
easy, and possibly bring about a federation of the whole group of
South African States. He was too impatient to let the situation
mature quietly. He forced the issue by encouraging the foolish
Jameson Raid of 1895. This, like all wilful resorts to violence,
only made things worse. It alienated and angered the more moderate
Boers in the Transvaal, who were not without sympathy with the
Uitlanders. It aroused the indignation of the Cape Colony Boers,
and embittered racial feeling there. It put the British cause in
the wrong in the eyes of the whole world, and made the Boers
appear as a gallant little people struggling in the folds of a
merciless python-empire. It increased immensely the difficulty of
the British government in negotiating with the Transvaal for
better treatment of the Uitlanders. It stiffened the backs of
Kruger and his party. The German Kaiser telegraphed his
congratulations on the defeat of the Raid 'without the aid of
friendly powers,' and the implication that this aid would be
forthcoming in case of necessity led the Boers to believe that
they could count on German help in a struggle with Britain. So
every concession to the Uitlanders was obstinately refused; and
after three years more of fruitless negotiation, during which
German munitions were pouring into the Transvaal, the South
African War began. It may be that the war could have been avoided
by the exercise of patience. It may be that the imperialist
spirit, which was very strong in Britain at that period, led to
the adoption of a needlessly high-handed tone. But it was neither
greed nor tyranny on Britain's part which brought about the
conflict, but simply the demand for equal rights.

The war was one in which all the appearances were against Britain,
and the whole world condemned British greed and aggression. It was
a case of Goliath fighting David, the biggest empire in the world
attacking two tiny republics; yet the weaker side is not
necessarily always in the right. It seemed to be a conflict for
the possession of gold-mines; yet Britain has never made, and
never hoped to make, a penny of profit out of these mines, which
remained after the war in the same hands as before it. It was a
case of the interests of financiers and gold-hunters against those
of simple and honest farmers; yet even financiers have rights, and
even farmers can be unjust. In reality the issue was a quite
simple and straightforward one. It was the issue of racial
ascendancy against racial equality, and as her traditions bade
her, Britain strove for racial equality. It was the issue of self-
government for the whole community as against the entrenched
dominion of one section; and there was no question on which side
the history of Britain must lead her to range herself. Whatever
the rest of the world might say, the great self-governing
colonies, which were free to help or not as they thought fit, had
no doubts at all. They all sent contingents to take part in the
war, because they knew it to be a war for principles fundamental
to themselves.

The war dragged its weary course, and the Boers fought with such
heroism, and often with such chivalry, as to win the cordial
respect and admiration of their enemies. It is always a pity when
men fight; but sometimes a fight lets bad blood escape, and makes
friendship easier between foes who have learnt mutual respect.
Four years after the peace which added the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State as conquered dominions to the British Empire,
the British government established in both of these provinces the
full institutions of responsible self-government. As in Canada
sixty years earlier, the two races were bidden to work together
and make the best of one another; because now their destinies were
freely under their own control. Yet this was even a bolder
experiment than that of Canada, and showed a more venturesome
confidence in the healing power of self-government. How has it
turned out? Within five years more, the four divided provinces
which had presented such vexed problems in 1878, were combined in
the federal Union of South Africa, governed by institutions which
reproduced those of Britain and her colonies.

In handing over to the now united states of South Africa the

unqualified control of their own affairs, Britain necessarily left
to them the vexed problem of devising a just relation between the
ruling races and their subjects of backward or alien stocks; the
problem which had been the source of most of the difficulties of
South Africa for a century past, and which had long delayed the
concession of full self-government. Nowhere in the world does this
problem assume a more acute form than in South Africa, where there
is not only a majority of negroes, mostly of the vigorous Bantu
stock, but also a large number of immigrants mainly from India,
who as subjects of the British crown naturally claim special
rights. South Africa has to find her own solution for this complex
problem; and she has not yet fully found it. But in two ways her
association with the British Empire has helped, and will help, her
to find her way towards it. If the earlier policy of the British
government, guided by the missionaries, laid too exclusive an
emphasis upon native rights, and in various ways hampered the
development of the colony by the way in which it interpreted these
rights, at least it had established a tradition hostile to that
policy of mere ruthless exploitation of which such an ugly
illustration was being given in German South-West Africa. An
absolute parity of treatment between white and black must be not
only impracticable, but harmful to both sides. But between the two
extremes of a visionary equality and a white ascendancy ruthlessly
employed for exploitation, a third term is possible--the just
tutelage of the white man over the black, with a reasonable
freedom for native custom. 'A practice has grown up in South
Africa,' says the greatest of South African statesmen, [Footnote:
General Smuts, May 22, 1917.] 'of creating parallel institutions,
giving the natives their own separate institutions on parallel
lines with institutions for whites. It may be that on these lines
we may yet be able to solve a problem which may otherwise be
insoluble.' It is a solution which owes much to the British
experiments of the previous period; and the principle which
inspires it was incorporated in the Act of Union. This is one of
the innumerable fruitful experiments in government in which the
British system is so prolific. Again, the problem of the
relationship between Indian immigrants and white colonists is an
acutely difficult one. It cannot be said to have been solved. But
at least the fact that the South African Union and the Indian
Empire are both partners in the same British commonwealth improves
the chances of a just solution. It helped to find at least a
temporary adjustment in 1914; in the future also it may
contribute, in this as in many other ways, to ensure that a fair
consideration is given to both sides of the thorny question of
inter-racial relationship.

The events which led up to, and still more the events which
followed, the South African War had thus brought a solution for
the South African problem, which had been a continuous vexation
since the moment of the British conquest. It was solved by the
British panacea of self-government and equal rights. Who could
have anticipated, twenty years or fifty years ago, the part which
has been played by South Africa in the Great War? Is there any
parallel to these events, which showed the gallant general of the
Boer forces playing the part of prime minister in a united South
Africa, crushing with Boer forces a revolt stirred up among the
more ignorant Boers by German intrigue, and then leading an army,
half Boer and half British, to the conquest of German South-West
Africa?

The South African War had proved to be the severest test which the
modern British Empire had yet had to undergo. But it had emerged,
not broken, as in 1782, but rejuvenated, purged of the baser
elements which had alloyed its imperial spirit, and confirmed in
its faith in the principles on which it was built. More than that,
on the first occasion on which the essential principles or the
power of the empire had been challenged in war, all the self-
governing colonies had voluntarily borne their share. Apart from a
small contingent sent from Australia to the Soudan in 1885,
British colonies had never before--indeed, no European colony had
ever before--sent men oversea to fight in a common cause: and this
not because their immediate interests were threatened, but for the
sake of an idea. For that reason the South African War marks an
epoch not merely in the history of the British Empire, but of
European imperialism as a whole.

The unity of sentiment and aim which was thus expressed had,
however, been steadily growing throughout the period of European
rivalry; and doubtless in the colonies, as in Britain, the new
value attached to the imperial tie was due in a large degree to
the very fact of the eagerness of the other European powers for
extra-European possessions. Imperialist sentiment began to become
a factor in British politics just about the beginning of this
period: in 1878 the Imperial Federation Society was founded, and
about the same time Disraeli, who had once spoken of the colonies
as 'millstones around our necks,' was making himself the
mouthpiece of the new imperialist spirit. To this wave of feeling
a very notable contribution was made by Sir John Seeley's
brilliant book, "The Expansion of England." Slight as it was, and
containing no facts not already familiar, it gave a new
perspective to the events of the last four centuries of British
history, and made the growth of the Empire seem something not
merely casual and incidental, but a vital and most significant
part of the British achievement. Its defect was, perhaps, that it
concentrated attention too exclusively upon the external aspects
of the wonderful story, and dwelt too little upon its inner
spirit, upon the force and influence of the instinct of self-
government which has been the most potent factor in British
history. The powerful impression which it created was deepened by
other books, like Froude's "Oceana" and Sir Charles Dilke's
"Greater Britain," the title of which alone was a proclamation and
a prophecy. It was strengthened also by the wonderful imperial
pageants, like nothing else ever witnessed in the world, which
began with the two Jubilee celebrations of 1887 and 1897, and were
continued in the funerals of Queen Victoria and Edward VII., the
coronations of Edward VII. and George V., and the superb Durbars
of Delhi. The imaginative appeal of such solemn representations of
a world-scattered fellowship of peoples and nations and tongues
must not be underestimated. At first there was perhaps a
suggestion of blatancy, and of mere pride in dominion, in the way
in which these celebrations were received; the graver note of
Kipling's 'Recessional,' inspired by the Jubilee of 1897, was not
unneeded. But after the strain and anxiety of the South African
War, a different temper visibly emerged.

More important than the pageants were the conferences of imperial

statesmen which arose out of them. The prime ministers of the
great colonies began to deliberate in common with the statesmen of
Britain; and the discussions, though at first quite informal and
devoid of authority, have become more intimate and vital as time
has passed: a beginning at least has been made in the common
discussion of problems affecting the Empire as a whole. And
alongside of, and in consequence of, all this, imperial questions
have been treated with a new seriousness in the British
parliament, and the offices which deal with them have ceased to
be, as they once were, reserved for statesmen of the second rank.
The new attitude was pointedly expressed when in 1895 Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, the most brilliant politician of his generation, who
could have had almost any office he desired, deliberately chose
the Colonial Office. His tenure of that office was not, perhaps,
memorable for any far-reaching change in colonial policy, though
he introduced some admirable improvements in the administration of
the tropical colonies; but it was most assuredly memorable for the
increased intensity of interest which he succeeded in arousing in
imperial questions, both at home and in the colonies. The campaign
which he initiated, after the South African War, for the
institution of an Imperial Zollverein or a system of Colonial
Preference was a failure, and indeed was probably a blunder, since
it implied an attempt to return to that material basis of imperial
unity which had formed the core of the old colonial system, and
had led to the most unhappy results in regard to the American
colonies. But at least it was an attempt to realise a fuller unity
than had yet been achieved, and in its first form included an
inspiring appeal to the British people to face sacrifices, should
they be necessary, for that high end. Whether these ideas
contribute to the ultimate solution of the imperial problem or
not, it was at least a good thing that the question should be
raised and discussed.

One further feature among the many developments of this era must
not be left untouched. It is the rise of a definitely national
spirit in the greater members of the Empire. To this a great
encouragement has been given by the political unity which some of
these communities have for the first time attained during these
years. National sentiment in the Dominion of Canada was stimulated
into existence by the Federation of 1867. The unification of
Australia which was at length achieved in the Federation of 1900
did not indeed create, but it greatly strengthened, the rise of a
similar spirit of Australian nationality. A national spirit in
South Africa, merging in itself the hostile racial sentiments of
Boer and Briton, may well prove to be the happiest result of the
Union of South Africa. In India also a national spirit is coming
to birth, bred among a deeply divided people by the political
unity, the peace, and the equal laws, which have been the greatest
gifts of British rule; its danger is that it may be too quick to
imagine that the unity which makes nationhood can be created
merely by means of resolutions declaring that it exists, but the
desire to create it is an altogether healthy desire. On the
surface it might appear that the rise of a national spirit in the
great members of the Empire is a danger to the ideal of imperial
unity; but that need not be so, and if it were so, the danger must
be faced, since the national spirit is too valuable a force to be
restricted. The sense of nationhood is the inevitable outcome of
the freedom and co-operation which the British system everywhere
encourages; to attempt to repress it lest it should endanger
imperial unity would be as short-sighted as the old attempt to
restrict the natural growth of self-government because it also
seemed a danger to imperial unity. The essence of the British
system is the free development of natural tendencies, and the
encouragement of variety of types; and the future towards which
the Empire seems to be tending is not that of a highly centralised
and unified state, but that of a brotherhood of free nations,
united by community of ideas and institutions, co-operating for
many common ends, and above all for the common defence in case of
need, but each freely following the natural trend of its own
development.

That is the conception of empire, unlike any other ever

entertained by men upon this planet, which was already shaping
itself among the British communities when the terrible ordeal of
the Great War came to test it, and to prove as not even the
staunchest believer could have anticipated, that it was capable of
standing the severest trial which men or institutions have ever
had to undergo.

IX

THE GREAT CHALLENGE, 1900-1914

At the opening of the twentieth century the long process whereby

the whole globe has been brought under the influence of European
civilisation was practically completed; and there had emerged a
group of gigantic empires, which in size far surpassed the ancient
Empire of Rome; each resting upon, and drawing its strength from,
a unified nation-state. In the hands of these empires the
political destinies of the world seemed to rest, and the lesser
nation-states appeared to be altogether overshadowed by them.
Among the vast questions which fate was putting to humanity, there
were none more momentous than these: On what principles, and in
what spirit, were these nation-empires going to use the power
which they had won over their vast and varied multitudes of
subjects? What were to be their relations with one another? Were
they to be relations of conflict, each striving to weaken or
destroy its rivals in the hope of attaining a final world-
supremacy? Or were they to be relations of co-operation in the
development of civilisation, extending to the whole world those
tentative but far from unsuccessful efforts after international
co-operation which the European states had long been endeavouring
to work out among themselves? [Footnote: See the Essay on
Internationalism (Nationalism and Internationalism, p. 124 ff.).]
At first it seemed as if the second alternative might be adopted,
for these were the days of the Hague Conferences; but the
development of events during the first fourteen years of the
century showed with increasing clearness that one of the new
world-states was resolute to make a bid for world-supremacy, and
the gradual maturing of this challenge, culminating in the Great
War, constitutes the supreme interest of these years.

The oldest, and (by the rough tests of area, population, and
natural resources) by far the greatest of these new composite
world-states, was the British Empire, which included 12,000,000
square miles, or one-quarter of the land-surface of the globe. It
rested upon the wealth, vigour, and skill of a population of
45,000,000 in the homeland, to which might be added, but only by
their own consent, the resources of five young daughter-nations,
whose population only amounted to about 15,000,000. Thus it stood
upon a rather narrow foundation. And while it was the greatest, it
was also beyond comparison the most loosely organised of all these
empires. It was rather a partnership of a multitude of states in
every grade of civilisation than an organised and consolidated
dominion. Five of its chief members were completely self-
governing, and shared in the common burdens only by their own free
will. All the remaining members were organised as distinct units,
though subject to the general control of the home government. The
resources of each unit were employed exclusively for the
development of its own welfare. They paid no tribute; they were
not required to provide any soldiers beyond the minimum needed for
their own defence and the maintenance of internal order. This
empire, in short, was not in any degree organised for military
purposes. It possessed no great land-army, and was, therefore,
incapable of threatening the existence of any of its rivals. It
depended for its defence firstly upon its own admirable strategic
distribution, since it was open to attack at singularly few points
otherwise than from the sea; it depended mainly, for that reason,
upon naval power, and secure command of the sea-roads by which its
members were linked was absolutely vital to its existence. Only by
sea-power (which is always weak in the offensive) could it
threaten its neighbours or rivals; and its sea-power, during four
centuries, had always, in war, been employed to resist the
threatened domination of any single power, and had never, in time
of peace, been employed to restrict the freedom of movement of any
of the world's peoples. On the contrary, the Freedom of the Seas
had been established by its victories, and dated from the date of
its ascendancy. The life-blood of this empire was trade; its
supreme interest was manifestly peace. The conception of the
meaning of empire which had been developed by its history was not
a conception of dominion for dominion's sake, or of the
exploitation of subjects for the advantage of a master. On the
contrary, it had come to mean (especially during the nineteenth
century) a trust; a trust to be administered in the interests of
the subjects primarily, and secondarily in the interests of the
whole civilised world. That this is not the assertion of a theory
or an ideal, but of a fact and a practice, is sufficiently
demonstrated by two unquestionable facts: the first that the units
which formed this empire were not only free from all tribute in
money or men, but were not even required to make any contribution
towards the upkeep of the fleet, upon which the safety of all
depended; the second that every port and every market in this vast
empire, so far as they were under the control of the central
government, were thrown open as freely to the citizens of all
other states as to its own. Finally, in this empire there had
never been any attempt to impose a uniformity of method or even of
laws upon the infinitely various societies which it included: it
not merely permitted, it cultivated and admired, varieties of
type, and to the maximum practicable degree believed in self-
government. Because these were the principles upon which it was
administered, the real strength of this empire was far greater
than it appeared. But beyond question it was ill-prepared and ill-
organised for war; desiring peace beyond all things, and having
given internal peace to one-quarter of the earth's population, it
was apt to be over-sanguine about the maintenance of peace. And if
a great clash of empires should come, this was likely to tell
against it.

The second oldest--perhaps it ought to be described as the oldest

--of the world-empires, and the second largest in area, was the
Russian Empire, which covered 8,500,000 square miles of territory.
Its strength was that its vast domains formed a single continuous
block, and that its population was far more homogeneous than that
of its rivals, three out of four of its subjects being either of
the Russian or of kindred Slavonic stock. Its weaknesses were that
it was almost land-locked, nearly the whole of its immense
coastline being either inaccessible, or ice-bound during half of
the year; and that it had not adopted modern methods of
government, being subject to a despotism, working through an
inefficient, tyrannical, and corrupt bureaucracy. In the event of
a European war it was further bound to suffer from the facts that
its means of communication and its capacity for the movement of
great armies were ill-developed; and that it was far behind all
its rivals in the control of industrial machinery and applied
science, upon which modern warfare depends, and without which the
greatest wealth of man-power is ineffective. At the opening of the
twentieth century Russia was still pursuing the policy of Eastward
expansion at the expense of China, which the other Western powers
had been compelled to abandon by the formation of the Anglo-
Japanese alliance. Able to bring pressure upon China from the
landward side, she was not deterred by the naval predominance
which this alliance enjoyed, and she still hoped to control
Manchuria, and to dominate the policy of China. But these aims
brought her in conflict with Japan, who had been preparing for the
conflict ever since 1895. The outcome of the war (1904), which
ended in a disastrous Russian defeat, had the most profound
influence upon the politics of the world. It led to an internal
revolution in Russia. It showed that the feet of the colossus were
of clay, and that her bureaucratic government was grossly corrupt
and incompetent. It forbade Russia to take an effective part in
the critical events of the following years, and notably disabled
her from checking the progress of German and Austrian ascendancy
in the Balkans. Above all it increased the self-confidence of
Germany, and inspired her rulers with the dangerous conviction
that the opposing forces with which they would have to deal in the
expected contest for the mastery of Europe could be more easily
overthrown than they had anticipated. To the Russian defeat must
be mainly attributed the blustering insolence of German policy
during the next ten years, and the boldness of the final challenge
in 1914.

The third of the great empires was that of France, with 5,000,000
square miles of territory, mostly acquired in very recent years,
but having roots in the past. It rested upon a home population of
only 39,000,000, but these belonged to the most enlightened, the
most inventive, and the most chivalrous stock in Christendom. As
France had, a hundred years before, raised the standard of human
rights among the European peoples, so she was now bringing law and
justice and peace to the backward peoples of Africa and the East;
and was finding in the pride of this achievement some consolation
for the brtitality with which she had been hurled from the
leadership of Europe.

The fourth of the great empires was America, with some 3,000,000
square miles of territory, and a vague claim of suzerainty over
the vast area of Central and South America. Her difficult task of
welding into a nation masses of people of the most heterogeneous
races had been made yet more difficult by the enormous flood of
immigrants, mainly from the northern, eastern, and south-eastern
parts of Europe, which had poured into her cities during the last
generation: they proved to be in many ways more difficult to
digest than their predecessors, and they tended, in a dangerous
way, to live apart and to organise themselves as separate
communities. The presence of these organised groups made it
sometimes hard for America to maintain a quite clear and
distinctive attitude in the discussions of the powers, most of
which had, as it were, definite bodies of advocates among her
citizens; and it was perhaps in part for this reason that she had
tended to fall back again to that attitude of aloofness towards
the affairs of the non-American world from which she seemed to
have begun to depart in the later years of the last century.
Although she had herself taken a hand in the imperialist
activities of the 'nineties, the general attitude of her citizens
towards the imperial controversies of Europe was one of contempt
or undiscriminating condemnation. Her old tradition of isolation
from the affairs of Europe was still very strong--still the
dominating factor in her policy. She had not yet grasped (indeed,
who, in any country, had?) the political consequences of the new
era of world-economy into which we have passed. And therefore she
could not see that the titanic conflict of Empires which was
looming ahead was of an altogether different character from the
old conflicts of the European states, that it was fundamentally a
conflict of principles, a fight for existence between the ideal of
self-government and the ideal of dominion, and that it must
therefore involve, for good or ill, the fortunes of the whole
globe. She watched the events which led up to the great agony with
impartial and deliberate interest. Even when the war began she
clung with obstinate faith to the belief that her tradition of
aloofness might still be maintained. It is not surprising, when we
consider how deep-rooted this tradition was, that it took two and
a half years of carnage and horror to convert her from it. But it
was inevitable that in the end her still more deeply rooted
tradition of liberty should draw her into the conflict, and lead
her at last to play her proper part in the attempt to shape a new
world-order.

We cannot stop to analyse the minor world-states, Italy and Japan;

both of which might have stood aside from the conflict, but that
both realised its immense significance for themselves and for the
world.

Last among the world-states, both in the date of its foundation

and in the extent of its domains, was the empire of Germany, which
covered considerably less than 1,500,000 square miles, but rested
upon a home population of nearly 70,000,000, more docile, more
industrious, and more highly organised than any other human
society. The empire of Germany had been more easily and more
rapidly acquired than any of the others, yet since its foundation
it had known many troubles, because the hard and domineering
spirit in which it was ruled did not know how to win the
affections of its subjects. A parvenu among the great states--
having only attained the dignity of nationhood in the mid-
nineteenth century--Germany has shown none of that 'genius for
equality' which is the secret of good manners and of friendship
among nations as among individuals. Her conversation, at home and
abroad, had the vulgar self-assertiveness of the parvenu, and
turned always and wholly upon her own greatness. And her conduct
has been the echo of her conversation. She has persuaded herself
that she has a monopoly of power, of wisdom, and of knowledge, and
deserves to rule the earth. Of the magnitude and far-reaching
nature of her imperialist ambitions, we have said something in a
previous chapter. She had as yet failed to realise any of these
vaulting schemes, but she had not for that reason abandoned any of
them, and she kept her clever and insidious preparations on foot
in every region of the world upon which her acquisitive eyes had
rested. But the exasperation of her steady failure to achieve the
place in the world which she had marked out as her due had driven
her rulers more and more definitely to contemplate, and prepared
her people to uphold, a direct challenge to all her rivals. The
object of this challenge was to win for Germany her due share in
the non-European world, her 'place in the sun.' Her view of what
that share must be was such that it could not be attained without
the overthrow of all her European rivals, and this would bring
with it the lordship of the worid. It must be all or nothing.
Though not quite realising this alternative, the mind of Germany
was not afraid of it. She was in the mood to make a bold attempt,
if need be, to grasp even the sceptre of world-supremacy. The
world could not believe that any sane people could entertain such
megalomaniac visions; not even the events of the decade 1904-14
were enough to bring conviction; it needed the tragedy and
desolation of the war to prove at once their reality and their
folly. For they were folly even if they could be momentarily
realised. They sprang from the traditions of Prussia, which seemed
to demonstrate that all things were possible to him who dared all,
and scrupled nothing, and calculated his chances and his means
with precision. By force and fraud the greatness of Prussia had
been built; by force and fraud Prussia-Germany had become the
leading state of Europe, feared by all her rivals and safe from
all attack. Force and fraud appeared to be the determining factors
in human affairs; even the philosophers of Germany devoted their
powers to justifying and glorifying them. By force and fraud,
aided by science, Germany should become the leader of the world,
and perhaps its mistress. Never has the doctrine of power been
proclaimed with more unflinching directness as the sole and
sufficient motive for state action. There was practically no
pretence that Germany desired to improve the condition of the
lands she wished to possess, or that they were misgoverned, or
that the existing German territories were threatened: what
pretence there was, was invented after war began. The sole and
sufficient reason put forward by the advocates of the policy which
Germany was pursuing was that she wanted more power and larger
dominions; and what she wanted she proposed to take

On the surface it seemed mere madness for the least and latest of
the great empires to challenge all the rest, just as it had once
seemed madness for Frederick the Great, with his little state, to
stand up against all but one of the great European powers. But
Germany had calculated her chances, and knew that there were many
things in her favour. She knew that in the last resort the
strength of the world-states rested upon their European
foundations, and here the inequality was much less. In a European
struggle she could draw great advantage from her central
geographical position, which she had improved to the highest
extent by the construction of a great system of strategic
railways. She could trust to her superbly organised military
system, more perfect than that of any other state, just because no
other state has ever regarded war as the final aim and the highest
form of state action. She commanded unequalled resources in all
the mechanical apparatus of war; she had spared no pains to build
up her armament works, which had, indeed, supplied a great part of
the world; she had developed all the scientific industries in such
a way that their factories could be rapidly and easily turned to
war purposes; and having given all her thoughts to the coming
struggle as no other nation had done, she knew, better than any
other, how largely it would turn upon these things. She counted
securely upon winning an immense advantage from the fact that she
would herself fix the date of war, and enter upon it with a sudden
spring, fully prepared, against rivals who, clinging to the hope
of peace, would be unready for the onset. She hoped to sow
jealousies among her rivals; she trusted to catch them at a time
when they were engrossed in their domestic concerns, and in this
respect fate seemed to play into her hands, since at the moment
which she had predetermined, Britain, France, and Russia were all
distracted by domestic controversies. She trusted also to her
reading of the minds and temper of her opponents; and here she
went wildly astray, as must always be the fate of the nation or
the man who is blinded by self-complacency and by contempt for
others.

But, above all, she put her trust in a vast political combination
which she had laboriously prepared during the years preceding the
great conflict: the combination which we have learned to call
Mittel-Europa. None of us realised to how great an extent this
plan had been put in operation before the war began. Briefly it
depended on the possibility of obtaining an intimate union with
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a control over the Turkish Empire,
and a sufficient influence or control among the little Balkan
states to ensure through communication. If the scheme could be
carried out in full, it would involve the creation of a
practically continuous empire stretching from the North Sea to the
Persian Gulf, and embracing a total population of over
150,000,000. This would be a dominion worth acquiring for its own
sake, since it would put Germany on a level with her rivals. But
it would have the further advantage that it would hold a central
position in relation to the other world-powers, corresponding to
Germany's central position in relation to the other nation-states
of Europe. Russia could be struck at along the whole length of her
western and south-western frontier; the British Empire could be
threatened in Egypt, the centre of its ocean lines of
communication, and also from the Persian Gulf in the direction of
India; the French Empire could be struck at the heart, in its
European centre; and all without seriously laying open the
attacking powers to the invasion of sea-power.

It was a bold and masterful scheme, and it was steadily pursued

during the years before the war. Austro-Hungary was easily
influenced. The ascendancy of her ruling races--nay, the very
existence of her composite anti-national empire--was threatened
by the nationalist movements among her subject-peoples, who,
cruelly oppressed at home, were more and more beginning to turn
towards their free brothers over the border, in Serbia and
Rumania; and behind these loomed Russia, the traditional protector
of the Slav peoples and of the Orthodox faith. Austro-Hungary,
therefore, leant upon the support of Germany, and her dominant
races would be very willing to join in a war which should remove
the Russian menace and give them a chance of subjugating the
Serbs. This latter aim suited the programme of Germany as well as
it suited that of Austria, since the railways to Constantinople
and Salonika ran through Serbia. Serbia, therefore, was doomed;
she stood right in the path of the Juggernaut car.

The acquisition of influence in Turkey was also comparatively

easy. Constantinople is a city where lavish corruption can work
wonders. Moreover Turkey was, in the last years of the nineteenth
century, in bad odour with Europe; and Germany was able to earn in
1897 the lasting gratitude of the infamous Sultan Abdul Hamid by
standing between him and the other European powers, who were
trying to interfere with his indulgence in the pastime of
massacring the Armenians. Turkey had had many protectors among the
European powers. She had never before had one so complaisant about
the murder of Christians. From that date Germany was all-powerful
in Turkey. The Turkish army was reorganised under her direction,
and practically passed under her control. Most of the Turkish
railways were acquired and managed by German companies. And
presently the great scheme of the Bagdad railway began to be
carried through. The Young Turk revolution in 1908 and the fall of
Abdul Hamid gave, indeed, a shock to the German ascendancy; but
only for a moment. The Young Turks were as amenable to corruption
as their predecessors; and under the guidance of Enver Bey Turkey
relapsed into German suzerainty. Thus the most important parts of
the great scheme were in a fair way of success by 1910. One of the
merits of this scheme was that as the Sultan of Turkey was the
head of the Mahomedan religion, the German protectorate over
Turkey gave a useful mode of appealing to the religious sentiments
of Mahomedans everywhere. Twice over, in 1898 and in 1904, the
Kaiser had declared that he was the protector of all Mahomedans
throughout the world. Most of the Mahomedans were subjects either
of Britain, France, or Russia--the three rival empires that were
to be overthrown. As General Bernhardi put it, Germany in her
struggle for Weltmacht must supplement her material weapons with
spiritual weapons.

To obtain a similar ascendancy over the Balkan states was more

difficult; for the Turk was the secular enemy of all of them, and
Austria was the foe of two of the four, and to bring these little
states into partnership with their natural enemies seemed an all
but impossible task. Yet a good deal could be, and was, done. In
two of the four chief Balkan states German princes occupied the
thrones, a Hohenzollern in Rumania, a Coburger in Bulgaria; in a
third, the heir-apparent to the Greek throne was honoured with the
hand of the Kaiser's own sister. Western peoples had imagined that
the day had gone by when the policy of states could be deflected
by such facts; especially as the Balkan states all had democratic
parliamentary constitutions. But the Germans knew better than the
West. They knew that kings could still play a great part in
countries where the bulk of the electorate were illiterate, and
where most of the class of professional politicians were always
open to bribes. Their calculations were justified. King Carol of
Rumania actually signed a treaty of alliance with Germany without
consulting his ministers or parliament. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria
was able to draw his subjects into an alliance with the Turks, who
had massacred their fathers in 1876, against the Russians, who had
saved them from destruction. King Constantine of Greece was able
to humiliate and disgrace the country over which he ruled, in
order to serve the purposes of his brother-in-law. These
sovereigns may have been the unconscious implements of a policy
which they did not understand. But they earned their wages.

There were, indeed, two moments when the great scheme came near
being wrecked. One was when Italy, the sleeping partner of the
Triple Alliance, who was not made a sharer in these grandiose and
vile projects, attacked and conquered the Turkish province of
Tripoli in 1911, and strained to breaking-point the loyalty of the
Turks to Germany. The other was when, under the guidance of the
two great statesmen of the Balkans, Venizelos of Greece and
Pashitch of Serbia, the Balkan League was formed, and the power of
Turkey in Europe broken. If the League had held together, the
great German project would have been ruined, or at any rate
gravely imperilled. But Germany and Austria contrived to throw an
apple of discord among the Balkan allies at the Conference of
London in 1912, and then stimulated Bulgaria to attack Serbia and
Greece. The League was broken up irreparably; its members had been
brought into a sound condition of mutual hatred; and Bulgaria,
isolated among distrustful neighbours, was ready to become the
tool of Germany in order that by her aid she might achieve (fond
hope!) the hegemony of the Balkans. This brilliant stroke was
effected in 1913--the year before the Great War. All that remained
was to ruin Serbia. For that purpose Austria had long been
straining at the leash. She had been on the point of making an
attack in 1909, in 1912, in 1913. In 1914 the leash was slipped.
If the rival empires chose to look on while Serbia was destroyed,
well and good: in that case the Berlin-Bagdad project could be
systematically developed and consolidated, and the attack on the
rival empires could come later. If not, still it was well; for all
was ready for the great challenge.

We have dwelt at some length upon this gigantic project, because

it has formed during all these years the heart and centre of the
German designs, and even to-day it is the dearest of German hopes.
Not until she is utterly defeated will she abandon it; because its
abandonment must involve the abandonment of every hope of a
renewed attempt at world-supremacy, after an interval for
reorganisation and recovery. Not until the German control over
Austria and Turkey, more complete to-day, after two and a half
years of war, than it has ever been before, has been destroyed by
the splitting up of Austria among the nationalities to which her
territory belongs, and by the final overthrow of the Turkish
Empire, will the German dream of world-dominion be shattered.

But while this fundamentally important project was being worked

out, other events, almost equally momentous in their bearing upon
the coming conflict, were taking place elsewhere. It was the
obvious policy of Germany to keep her rivals on bad terms with one
another. The tradition of Bismarck bade her isolate each victim
before it was destroyed. But the insolence and the megalomania of
modern Germany made this difficult. German writers were busily and
openly explaining the fate marked out for all the other powers.
France was to be so crushed that she would 'never again be able to
stand in our path.' The bloated and unconsolidated empire of
Britain was to be shattered. The Russian barbarians were to be
thrust back into Asia. And what the pamphleteers and journalists
wrote was expressed with almost equal clearness in the tone of
German diplomacy. In face of all this, the clumsy attempts of the
German government to isolate their rivals met with small success,
even though these rivals had many grounds of controversy among
themselves. France knew what she had to fear; and the
interpolation of a few clumsy bids for her favour amid the torrent
of insults against her which filled the German press, were of no
avail; especially as she had to look on at the unceasing petty
persecution practised in the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.
Russia had been alienated by the first evidences of German designs
in the Balkans, and driven into a close alliance with France.
Britain, hitherto obstinately friendly to Germany, began to be
perturbed by the growing German programmes of naval construction
from 1900 onwards, by the absolute refusal of Germany to consider
any proposal for mutual disarmament or retardation of
construction, and above all by the repeated assertions of the head
of the German state that Germany aspired to naval supremacy, that
her future was on the sea, that the trident must be in her hands.
Should the trident fall into any but British hands, the existence
of the British Empire, and the very livelihood of the British
homeland, would rest at the mercy of him who wielded it. So, quite
inevitably, the three threatened empires drew together and
reconciled their differences in the Franco-British agreement of
1904 and the Russo-British agreement of 1907.

These agreements dealt wholly with extra-European questions, and

therefore deserve some analysis. In the Franco-British agreement
the main feature was that while France withdrew her opposition to
the British position in Egypt, Britain on her side recognised the
paramount political interest of France in Morocco. It was the
agreement about Morocco which counted for most; because it was the
beginning of a controversy which lasted for seven years, which was
twice used by Germany as a means for testing, and endeavouring to
break, the friendship of her rivals, and which twice brought
Europe to the verge of war.

Morocco is a part of that single region of mountainous North

Africa of which France already controlled the remainder, Tunis and
Algeria. Peoples of the same type inhabited the whole region, but
while in Tunis and Algeria they were being brought under the
influence of law and order, in Morocco they remained in anarchy.
Only a conventional line divided Morocco from Algeria, and the
anarchy among the tribesmen on one side of the line inevitably had
an unhappy effect upon the people on the other side of the line.
More than once France had been compelled, for the sake of Algeria,
to intervene in Morocco. It is impossible to exaggerate the
anarchy which existed in the interior of this rich and wasted
country. It was, indeed, the most lawless region remaining in the
world: when Mr. Bernard Shaw wished to find a scene for a play in
which the hero should be a brigand chief leading a band of rascals
and outlaws from all countries, Morocco presented the only
possible scene remaining in the world. And this anarchy was the
more unfortunate, not only because the country was naturally rich
and ought to have been prosperous, but also because it lay in
close proximity to great civilised states, and on one of the main
routes of commerce at the entrance to the Mediterranean. In its
ports a considerable traffic was carried on by European traders,
but this traffic was, owing to the anarchic condition of the
country, nothing like as great as it ought to have been. In 1905,
39 per cent. of it was controlled by French traders, 32 per cent.
by British traders, 12 per cent. by German traders, and 5 per
cent. by Spanish traders. Manifestly this was a region where law
and order ought to be established, in the interests of
civilisation. The powers most directly concerned were in the first
place France, with her neighbouring territory and her preponderant
trade; in the second place Britain, whose strategic interests as
well as her trading interests were involved; in the third place
Spain, which directly faced the Morocco coast; while Germany had
only trading interests involved, and so long as these were
safeguarded, had no ground of complaint. If any single power was
to intervene, manifestly the first claim was upon France.

In 1900 France had directed the attention of Europe to the

disorderly condition of Morocco, and had proposed to intervene to
restore order, on the understanding that she should not annex the
country, or interfere with the trading rights of other nations.
Some states agreed; Germany made no reply, but made no objection.
But owing to the opposition of Britain, who was then on bad terms
with France and feared to see an unfriendly power controlling the
entrance to the Mediterranean, no action was taken; and in the
next years the chaos in Morocco grew worse. By the agreement of
1904 Britain withdrew her objection to French intervention, and
recognised the prior political rights of France in Morocco, on the
condition that the existing government of Morocco should be
maintained, that none of its territory should be annexed, and that
'the open door' should be preserved for the trade of all nations.
But, of course, it was possible, and even probable, that the
existing Moroccan government could not be made efficient. In that
case, what should happen? The possibility had to be contemplated
by reasonable statesmen, and provided against. But to do so in a
public treaty would have been to condemn beforehand the existing
system. Therefore a hypothetical arrangement was made for this
possible future event in a secret treaty, to which Spain was made
a party; whereby it was provided that if the arrangement should
break down, and France should have to establish a definite
protectorate, the vital part of the north coast should pass under
the control of Spain.

To the public part of these arrangements, which alone were of

immediate importance, no objection was made by any of the other
powers, and the German Chancellor told the Reichstag that German
interests were not affected. France accordingly drew up a scheme
of reforms in the government of Morocco, which the Sultan was
invited to accept. But before he had accepted them the German
Kaiser suddenly came to Tangier in his yacht, had an interview
with the Sultan in which he urged him to reject the French
demands, and made a public speech in which he declared himself the
protector of the Mahomedans, asserted that no European power had
special rights in Morocco, and announced his determination to
support the 'independence and integrity' of Morocco--which in
existing circumstances meant the maintenance of anarchy. What was
the reason for this sudden and insolent intervention--made without
any previous communication with France? The main reason was that
France's ally, Russia, had just been severely defeated by Japan,
and would not be able to take part in a European war. Therefore,
it appeared, France might be bullied; Britain might not be willing
to risk war on such an issue; the Entente of 1904 might be
destroyed; the extension of French influence might be prevented;
and the preservation of a state of anarchy in Morocco would leave
open the chance of a seizure of that country by Germany at a later
date, thus enabling her to dominate the entrance to the
Mediterranean, and to threaten Algeria. But this pretty scheme did
not succeed. The Entente held firm. Britain gave steady support to
France, as indeed she was bound in honour to do; and in the end a
conference of the powers was held at Algeciras (Spain). At this
conference the predominating right of France to political
influence in Morocco was formally recognised; and it was agreed
that the government of the Sultan should be maintained, and that
all countries should have equal trading rights in Morocco. This
was, of course, the very basis of the Franco-British agreement. On
every point at which she tried to score a success over France,
Germany was defeated by the votes of the other powers, even her
own ally, Italy, deserting her.

But the German intervention had had its effect. The Sultan had
refused the French scheme of reform. The elements of disorder in
Morocco were encouraged to believe that they had the protection of
Germany, and the activity of German agents strengthened this
belief. The anarchy grew steadily worse. In 1907 Sir Harry Maclean
was captured by a brigand chief, and the British government had to
pay 20,000 pounds ransom for his release. In the same year a
number of European workmen engaged on harbour works at Casablanca
were murdered by tribesmen; and the French had to send a force
which had a year's fighting before it reduced the district to
order. In 1911 the Sultan was besieged in his capital (where there
were a number of European residents) by insurgent tribesmen, and
had to invite the French to send an army to his relief.

This was seized upon by Germany as a pretext. Morocco was no

longer 'independent.' The agreement of Algecras was dead.
Therefore she resumed her right to put forward what claims she
pleased in Morocco. Suddenly her gunboat, the Panther, appeared
off Agadir. It was meant as an assertion that Germany had as much
right to intervene in Morocco as France. And it was accompanied by
a demand that if France wanted to be left free in Morocco, she
must buy the approval of Germany. The settlement of Morocco was to
be a question solely between France and Germany. The Entente of
1904, the agreement of 1906, the Moroccan interests of Britain
(much more important than those of Germany), and the interests of
the other powers of the Algeciras Conference, were to count for
nothing. Germany's voice must be the determining factor. But
Germany announced that she was willing to be bought off by large
concessions of French territory elsewhere--provided that Britain
was not allowed to have anything to say: provided, that is, that
the agreement of 1904 was scrapped. This was a not too subtle way
of trying to drive a wedge between two friendly powers. It did not
succeed. Britain insisted upon being consulted. There was for a
time a real danger of war. In the end peace was maintained by the
cession by France of considerable areas in the Congo as the price
of German abstention from intervening in a sphere where she had no
right to intervene. But Morocco was left under a definite French
protectorate.

We have dwelt upon the Morocco question at some length, partly

because it attracted a vast amount of interest during the years of
preparation for the war; partly because it affords an
extraordinarily good illustration of the difficulty of maintaining
peaceable relations with Germany, and of the spirit in which
Germany approached the delicate questions of inter-imperial
relationships--a spirit far removed indeed from that friendly
willingness for compromise and co-operation by which alone the
peace of the world could be maintained; and partly because it
illustrates the crudity and brutality of the methods by which
Germany endeavoured to separate her intended victims. It is
improbable that she ever meant to go to war on the Moroccan
question. She meant to go to war on whatever pretext might present
itself when all her preparations were ready; but in the meanwhile
she would avoid war on all questions but one: and that one was the
great Berlin-Bagdad project, the keystone of her soaring arch of
Empire. She would fight to prevent the ruin of that scheme.
Otherwise she would preserve the peace, she would even make
concessions to preserve the peace, until the right moment had
come. In that sense Germany was a peace-loving power: in that
sense alone.

On the agreement between Russia and Britain in 1907 it is

unnecessary to dwell with such fulness. The agreement turned
mainly upon the removal of causes of friction in the Middle East--
in Persia and the Persian Gulf, and in Tibet. These were in
themselves interesting and thorny questions, especially the
question of Persia, where the two powers established distinct
spheres of interest and a sort of joint protectorate. But they
need not detain us, because they had no direct bearing upon the
events leading up to the war, except in so far as, by removing
friction between two rivals of long standing, they made it
possible for them to co-operate for their common defence against a
menace that became more and more apparent.

From 1907 onwards Germany found herself confronted by united

defensive action on the part of the three empires whose downfall
she intended to compass. It was not (except as regarded France and
Russia) a formal alliance which bound these powers. There was no
fixed agreement between them as to military co-operation. France
and Britain had indeed, in 1906 and in 1911, consulted as to the
military steps they should take if they were drawn into war, as
seemed likely in those years, but neither was in any way bound to
help the other under all circumstances. France and Britain had
also agreed that the French fleet should be concentrated in the
Mediterranean, the main British fleet in the North Sea. This
arrangement (which was universally known, and, indeed, could not
be concealed) put Britain under a moral obligation to defend
France against naval attack, but only if France were the object of
aggression. It was, therefore, actually a safeguard of peace,
since it ensured that neither France nor, consequently, her ally,
Russia, would begin a war without being sure of the concurrence of
Britain, the most pacific of powers. As the diplomatic records
show, at the opening of the Great War they were not sure of this
concurrence, even for naval purposes, until August 1, when the die
was already cast. The Triple Entente, therefore, was not an
alliance; it was only an agreement for common diplomatic action in
the hope of averting a terrible menace.

Until 1911 Germany, or some elements in Germany, seem to have

hoped that she could get her own way by bullying and rattling her
sabre, and that by these means she could frighten her rivals, make
them mutually distrustful, and so break up their combination and
deal with them in detail. Those who held this view were the peace-
party (so-called), and they included the Kaiser and his
Chancellor. They would probably not themselves have accepted this
description of their policy, but in practice this is what it
meant. But there was always a formidable and influential party in
Germany which had no patience with these hesitations, and was
eager to draw the sabre. It included the men of the General Staff,
backed by the numerous Pan-German societies and newspapers. The
issue of the Morocco question in 1911, which showed that the
policy of bullying had failed, played into the hands of the men of
violence; and from this moment began the last strenuous burst of
military preparation which preceded the war. In 1911 was passed
the first of a series of Army Acts for the increase of the already
immense German army, and still more for the provision of vast
equipment and the scientific apparatus of destruction; two further
Acts for the same purpose followed in 1912 and in 1913. In 1911
also was published General Bernhardi's famous book, which defined
and described the course of future action, and the aim which
Germany was henceforth to pursue with all her strength: Weltmacht
oder Niedergang, world-power or downfall.

The events in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 completed the

conversion of those who still clung to the policy of peaceful
bullying. The formation and triumph of the Balkan League in 1912
formed a grave set-back for the Berlin-Bagdad project, which would
be ruined if these little states became strong enough, or united
enough, to be independent. The break-up of the Balkan League and
the second Balkan War of 1913 improved the situation from the
German point of view. But they left Serbia unsatisfactorily
strong, and Serbia distrusted Austria, and controlled the
communications with Constantinople. Serbia must be destroyed;
otherwise the Berlin-Bagdad project, and with it the world-power
of which it was to be the main pillar, would be always insecure.
Austria was for attacking Serbia at once in 1913. Germany held her
back: the widening of the Kiel Canal was not completed, and the
fruits of the latest Army Acts were not yet fully reaped. But all
was ready in 1914; and the Great Challenge was launched. It would
have been launched at or about that time even if an unpopular
Austrian archduke, significantly unguarded by the Austrian police,
had NOT been most opportunely murdered by an Austrian subject on
Austrian territory. The murder was only a pretext. The real cause
of the war was the resolution of Germany to strike for world-
supremacy, and her belief that the time was favourable for the
great adventure.

Meanwhile, what had the threatened empires been doing during the
years of strenuous German preparation which began in 1911? Their
governments could not but be aware of the enormous activity which
was taking place in that country--which was unthreatened on any
side--though they probably did not know how thorough and how
elaborate it was. What steps did they take to guard against the
danger? Russia was busy constructing strategic railways, to make
the movement of troops easier; she was erecting new munition
factories. But neither could be quickly got ready. France imposed
upon the whole of her manhood the obligation of serving for three
instead of for two years in the army. Britain reorganised her
small professional army, created the Territorial Force, and began
the training of a large officer class in all the universities and
public schools. But she did not attempt to create a national army.
If she had done so, this would have been a signal for the
precipitation of the war. Besides, Britain obstinately clung to
the belief that so monstrous a crime as Germany seemed to be
contemplating could never be committed by a civilised nation; and
she trusted mainly to her fleet for her own security.

But Britain unquestionably laboured with all her might to conjure

away the nightmare. From 1906 onwards she had made, in vain,
repeated attempts to persuade Germany to accept a mutual
disarmament or retardation of naval construction. In 1912 she
resolved upon a more definite step. The German newspapers were
full of talk about the British policy of 'encircling' Germany in
order to attack and destroy her, which they attributed mainly to
Sir Edward Grey. It was a manifest absurdity, since the Franco-
Russian alliance was formed in 1894, at a time when Britain was on
bad terms with both France and Russia, and the agreements later
made with these two countries were wholly devoted to removing old
causes of dispute between them. But the German people obviously
believed it. Perhaps the German government also believed it?
Britain resolved to remove this apprehension. Accordingly in 1912
Lord Haldane was sent to Germany with a formal and definite
statement, authorised by the Cabinet, to the effect that Britain
had made no alliance or understanding which was aimed against
Germany, and had no intention of doing so. That being so, since
Germany need have no fear of an attack from Britain, why should
not the two powers agree to reduce their naval expenditure? The
German reply was that to stop the naval programme was impossible,
but that construction might be DELAYED, on one condition--that
both powers should sign a formal agreement drawn up by Germany.
Each power was to pledge itself to absolute neutrality in any
European war in which the other was engaged. Each power was to
undertake to make no new alliances. But this agreement was not to
affect existing alliances or the duties arising under them. This
proposal was an obvious trap, and the German ministers who
proposed it must have had the poorest opinion of the intelligence
of English statesmen if they thought it was likely to be accepted.
For observe that it left Germany, in conjunction with Austria,
free to attack France and Russia. It left the formidable Triple
Alliance unimpaired. But it tied the hands of Britain, who had no
existing European alliances, enforced neutrality upon her in such
a war, and compelled her to look on idly and wait her turn. In the
present war, Germany could have pleaded that she was bound to take
part by the terms of her alliance with Austria, who began it; but
Britain would have been compelled to stand aloof. A very
convenient arrangement for Germany, but not an arrangement that
promised well for the peace of the world!

Even this rebuff did not dishearten Britain. Feeling that Germany
might have some reasonable ground of complaint in the fact that
her share of the extra-European world was so much less than that
of France or of Britain herself, Britain attempted to come to an
agreement on this head, such as would show that she had no desire
to prevent the imperial expansion of Germany. A treaty was
proposed and discussed, and was ready to be submitted to the
proper authorities for confirmation in June 1914. It has never
been made public, because the war cancelled it before it came into
effect, and we do not know its terms. But we do know that the
German colonial enthusiast, Paul Rohrbach, who has seen the draft
treaty, has said that the concessions made by Britain were
astonishingly extensive, and met every reasonable German demand.
This sounds as if the proposals of the treaty, whatever they were,
had been recklessly generous. But this much is clear, that the
government which had this treaty in its possession when it forced
on the war was not to be easily satisfied. It did not want merely
external possessions. It wanted supremacy; it wanted world-
dominion.

One last attempt the British government made in the frenzied days
of negotiation which preceded the war. Sir Edward Grey had begged
the German government to make ANY proposal which would make for
peace, and promised his support beforehand; he had received no
reply. He had undertaken that if Germany made any reasonable
proposal, and France or Russia objected, he would have nothing
further to do with France or Russia. Still there was no reply.
Imagining that Germany might still be haunted by what Bismarck
called 'the nightmare of coalition,' and might be rushing into war
now because she feared a war in the future under more unfavourable
conditions, he had pledged himself, if Germany would only say the
word which would secure the peace, to use every effort to bring
about a general understanding among the great powers which would
banish all fears of an anti-German combination. It was of no use.
The reply was the suggestion that Britain should bind herself to
neutrality in this war on the following conditions: (a) that
Germany should be given a free hand to violate the neutrality of
Belgium (which Britain was bound by treaty to defend), on the
understanding that Belgium should be reinstated after she had
served her purpose, if she had offered no resistance; Belgium, be
it noted, being bound in honour to offer resistance by the very
treaty which Germany proposed to violate; and (b) that after
France had been humiliated and beaten to the earth for the crime
of possessing territories which Germany coveted, she should be
restored to independence, and Germany should be content to annex
her 5,000,000 square miles of colonies. In return for this
undertaking Britain was to be--allowed to hold aloof from the war,
and await her turn.

There is no getting over these facts. The aim of Germany had come
to be nothing less than world-supremacy. The destiny of the whole
globe was to be put to the test. Surely this was the very insanity
of megalomania.

WHAT OF THE NIGHT?

The gigantic conflict into which the ambitions of Germany have

plunged the world is the most tremendous event in human history,
not merely because of the vast forces engaged, and the appalling
volume of suffering which has resulted from it, but still more
because of the magnitude of the principles for which it is being
fought. It is a war to secure the right of communities which are
linked together by the national spirit to determine their own
destinies; it is a war to maintain the principles of humanity, the
sanctity of formal undertakings between states, and the
possibility of the co-operation of free peoples in the creation of
a new and better world-order; it is a war between two principles
of government, the principle of military autocracy and the
principle of self-government. With all these aspects of the mighty
struggle we are not here immediately concerned, though they have
an intimate bearing upon our main theme: some of them have been
analysed elsewhere. [Footnote: In Nationalism and Internationalism
and in National Self-Government.] But what does concern us most
directly, and what makes this war the culmination of the long
story which we have endeavoured to survey, is that this is a war
in which, as in no earlier war, the whole fate and future of the
now unified world is at stake. For just because the world is now,
as never before, an indissoluble economic and political unity, the
challenge of Germany, whatever view we may take of the immediate
aims of the German state, inevitably raises the whole question of
the principles upon which this unified world, unified by the
victory of European civilisation, is to be in future directed. And
the whole world knows, if vaguely, that these vast issues are at
stake, and that this is no merely European conflict. That is why
we see arrayed upon the fields of battle not only French, British,
Russian, Italian, Serbian, Belgian, Rumanian, Greek and Portuguese
soldiers, but Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South
Africans, Indians, Algerians, Senegalese, Cambodians; and now,
alongside of all these, the citizens of the American Republic.
That is why Brazil and other states are hovering on the edge of
the fray; why Japanese ships are helping to patrol the
Mediterranean, why Arab armies are driving the Turk from the holy
places of Mahomedanism, why African tribesmen are enrolled in new
levies to clear the enemy out of his footholds in that continent.
Almost the whole world is arrayed against the outlaw-power and her
vassals. And the ultimate reason for this is that the whole world
is concerned to see this terrible debate rightly determined.

For the issue is as simple as this. Now that the world has been
made one by the victory of Western civilisation, in what spirit is
that supremacy to be used? Is it to be in the spirit expressed in
the German Doctrine of Power, the spirit of mere dominion,
ruthlessly imposed and ruthlessly exploited for the sole advantage
of the master-power? That way ruin lies. Or is it to be in the
spirit which has on the whole, and in spite of lapses, guided the
progress of Western civilisation in the past, the spirit of
respect for law and for the rights of the weak, the spirit of
liberty which rejoices in variety of type and method, and which
believes that the destiny towards which all peoples should be
guided is that of self-government in freedom, and the co-operation
of free peoples in the maintenance of common interests? Britain,
France, and America have been the great advocates and exponents of
these principles in the government of their own states: they are
all ranged on one side to-day. Britain, also, as we have tried to
show, has been led by Fate to take a chief part in the extension
of these principles of Western civilisation to the non-European
regions of the world; and, after many mistakes and failures, has
in the direction of her own wide dominions found her way to a
system which reconciles freedom with unity, and learned to regard
herself as being only the trustee of civilisation in the
government of the backward peoples whom she rules. For the just
and final determination of such gigantic issues not even the
terrible price we are paying is too high.

The issue of the great conflict lies still upon the lap of the
gods. Yet one thing is, we may hope, already assured. Although at
the beginning of the war they came near to winning it, the Germans
are not now likely to win that complete victory upon which they
had calculated, and which would have brought as its prize the
mastery of the world. We can now form some judgment of the extent
of the calamity which this would have meant for humanity. There
would have remained in the world no power capable of resisting
this grim and ugly tyrant-state, with its brute strength and
bestial cruelty as of a gorilla in the primaeval forest,
reinforced by the cold and pitiless calculus of the man of science
in his laboratory; unless, perhaps, Russia had in time recovered
her strength, or unless America had not merely thrown over her
tradition of aloofness and made up her mind to intervene, but had
been allowed the time to organise her forces for resistance. Of
the great empires which the modern age has brought into being, the
Russian would have survived as a helpless and blinded mammoth; the
French Empire would have vanished, and the proud and noble land of
France would have sunk into vassalage and despair; the British
Empire would assuredly have dissolved into its component parts,
for its strength is still too much concentrated in the motherland
for it to be able to hold together once her power was broken.
After a few generations, that will no longer be the case; but to-
day it is so, and the dream of a partnership of free nations which
had begun to dawn upon us would have been shattered for ever by a
complete German victory. Some of the atoms of what once was an
empire might have been left in freedom, but they would have been
powerless to resist the decrees of the Master-state. There would
have been one supreme world-power; and that a power whose attitude
towards backward races has been illustrated by the ruthless
massacre of the Hereros; whose attitude towards ancient but
disorganised civilisations has been illustrated by the history of
Kiao-chau and by the celebrated allocution of the Kaiser to his
soldiers on the eve of the Boxer expedition, when he bade them
outdo the ferocity of Attila and his Huns; whose attitude towards
kindred civilisations on the same level as their own has been
illustrated before the war in the treatment of Danes, Poles, and
Alsatians, and during the war in the treatment of Belgium, of the
occupied districts in France, of Poland and of Serbia. The world
would have lain at the mercy of an insolent and ruthless tyranny,
the tyranny of a Kultur whose ideal is the uniformity of a perfect
mechanism, not the variety of life. Such a fate humanity could not
long have tolerated; yet before the iron mechanism could have been
shattered, if once it had been established, there must have been
inconceivable suffering, and civilisation must have fallen back
many stages towards barbarism. From this fate, we may perhaps
claim, the world was saved from the moment when not Britain only,
but the British Empire, refused to await its turn according to the
German plan, threw its whole weight into the scale, and showed
that, though not organised for war, it was not the effete and
decadent power, not the fortuitous combination of discordant and
incoherent elements, which German theory had supposed; but that
Freedom can create a unity and a virile strength capable of
withstanding even the most rigid discipline, capable of enduring
defeat and disappointment undismayed; but incapable of yielding to
the insolence of brute force.

It is still possible that the war may end in what is called an

inconclusive peace; and as it is certain that of all her
unrighteous gains that to which Germany will most desperately
cling will be her domination over the Austrian and Turkish
Empires, with the prospect which it affords of a later and more
fortunate attempt at world-power, an inconclusive peace would mean
that the whole world would live in constant dread of a renewal of
these agonies and horrors in a still more awful form. What the
effect of this would be upon the extra-European dominions of
powers which would be drained of their manhood and loaded with the
burden of the past war and the burden of preparation for the
coming war, it is beyond our power to imagine. But it seems likely
that the outer world would very swiftly begin to revise its
judgment as to the value of that civilisation which it has, upon
the whole, been ready to welcome; and chaos would soon come again.

Finally, it is possible that the Evil Power may be utterly routed,

and the allied empires, tried by fire, may be given the
opportunity and the obligation of making, not merely a new Europe,
but a new world. If that chance should come, how will they use it?
One thing at least is clear. The task which will face the
diplomats who take part in the coming peace-congress will be
different in kind as well as in degree from that of any of their
predecessors at any moment in human history. They will be
concerned not merely with the adjustment of the differences of a
few leading states, and not merely with the settlement of Europe:
they will have to deal with the whole world, and to decide upon
what principles and to what ends the leadership of the peoples of
European stock over the non-European world is to be exercised.
Whether they realise it or not, whether they intend it or not,
they will create either a world-order or a world-disorder. And it
will inevitably be a world-disorder which will result unless we do
some hard thinking on this gigantic problem which faces us, and
unless we are prepared to learn, from the history of the relations
of Europe with the outer world, what are the principles by which
we ought to be guided. We are too prone, when we think of the
problems of the future peace, to fix our attention almost wholly
upon Europe, and, if we think of the non-European world at all, to
assume either that the problem is merely one of power, or that the
principles which will guide us in the settlement of Europe can be
equally applied outside of Europe. Both of these assumptions are
dangerous, because both disregard the teachings of the past which
we have been surveying.

If, on the one hand, we are content to regard the problem as

merely one of power, and to divide out the non-European world
among the victors as the spoils of victory, we shall indeed have
been conquered by the very spirit which we are fighting; we shall
have become converts to the German Doctrine of Power, which has
brought upon us all these ills, and may bring yet more appalling
evils in the future. The world will emerge divided among a group
of vast empires which will overshadow the lesser states. These
empires will continue to regard one another with fear and
suspicion, and to look upon their subject-peoples merely as
providing the implements for a war of destruction, to be waged by
cut-throat commercial rivalry in time of peace, and by man-power
and machine-power in war. If that should be the result of all our
agonies, the burden which must be laid upon the peoples of these
empires, and the intolerable anticipation of what is to come, will
make their yoke seem indeed a heavy one; will probably bring about
their disintegration; and will end that ascendancy of Western
civilisation over the world which the last four centuries have
established. And justly; since Western civilisation will thus be
made to stand not for justice and liberty, but for injustice and
oppression. Such must be the inevitable result of any settlement
of the non-European world which is guided merely by the ambitions
of a few rival states and the Doctrine of Power.

On the other hand, we are urged by enthusiasts for liberty,

especially in Russia, to believe that imperialism as such is the
enemy; that we must put an end for ever to all dominion exercised
by one people over another; and that outside of Europe as within
it we must trust to the same principles for the hope of future
peace--the principles of national freedom and self-government--
and leave all peoples everywhere to control freely their own
destinies. But this is a misreading of the facts as fatal as the
other. It disregards the value of the work that has been done in
the extension of European civilisation to the rest of the world by
the imperial activities of the European peoples. It fails to
recognise that until Europe began to conquer the world neither
rational law nor political liberty had ever in any real sense
existed in the outer world, and that their dominion is even now
far from assured, but depends for its maintenance upon the
continued tutelage of the European peoples. It fails to realise
that the economic demands of the modern world necessitate the
maintenance of civilised administration after the Western pattern,
and that this can only be assured, in large regions of the earth,
by means of the political control of European peoples. Above all
this view does not grasp the essential fact that the idea of
nationhood and the idea of self-government are both modern ideas,
which have had their origin in Europe, and which can only be
realised among peoples of a high political development; that the
sense of nationhood is but slowly created, and must not be
arbitrarily defined in terms of race or language; and that the
capacity for self-government is only formed by a long process of
training, and has never existed except among peoples who were
unified by a strongly felt community of sentiment, and had
acquired the habit and instinct of loyalty to the law. Assuredly
it is the duty of Europe and America to extend these fruitful
conceptions to the regions which have passed under their
influence. But the process must be a very slow one, and it can
only be achieved under tutelage. It is the control of the European
peoples over the non-European world which has turned the world
into an economic unit, brought it within a single political
system, and opened to us the possibility of making a world-order
such as the most daring dreamers of the past could never have
conceived. This control cannot be suddenly withdrawn. For a very
long time to come the world-states whose rise we have traced must
continue to be the means by which the political discoveries of
Europe, as well as her material civilisation, are made available
for the rest of the world. The world-states are such recent things
that we have not yet found a place for them in our political
philosophy. But unless we find a place for them, and think in
terms of them, in the future, we shall be in danger of a terrible
shipwreck.

If, then, it is essential, not only for the economic development

of the world, but for the political advancement of its more
backward peoples, that the political suzerainty of the European
peoples should survive, and as a consequence that the world should
continue to be dominated by a group of great world-states, how are
we to conjure away the nightmare of inter-imperial rivalry which
has brought upon us the present catastrophe, and seems to threaten
us with yet more appalling ruin in the future? Only by resolving
and ensuring, as at the great settlement we may be able to do,
that the necessary political control of Europe over the outer
world shall in future be exercised not merely in the interests of
the mistress-states, but in accordance with principles which are
just in themselves, and which will give to all peoples a fair
chance of making the best use of their powers. But how are we to
discover these principles, if the ideas of nationality and self-
government, to which we pin our faith in Europe, are to be held
inapplicable to the greater part of the non-European world? There
is only one possible source of instruction: our past experience,
which has now extended over four centuries, and which we have in
this book endeavoured to survey.

Now while it is undeniably true that the mere lust of power has
always been present in the imperial activities of the European
peoples, it is certainly untrue (as our study ought to have shown)
that it has ever been the sole motive, except, perhaps, in the
great German challenge. And in the course of their experience the
colonising peoples have gradually worked out certain principles in
their treatment of subject peoples, which ought to be of use to
us. The fullest and the most varied experience is that of the
British Empire: it is the oldest of all the world-states; it alone
includes regions of the utmost variety of types, new lands peopled
by European settlers, realms of ancient civilisation like India,
and regions inhabited by backward and primitive peoples. It would
be absurd to claim that its methods are perfect and infallible.
But they have been very varied, and quite astonishingly
successful. And it is because they seem to afford clearer guidance
than any other part of the experiments which we have recorded that
we have studied them, especially in their later developments, with
what may have seemed a disproportionate fulness. What are the
principles which experience has gradually worked out in the
British Empire? They cannot be embodied in a single formula,
because they vary according to the condition and development of
the lands to which they apply.

But in the first place we have learnt by a very long experience

that in lands inhabited by European settlers, who bring with them
European traditions, the only satisfactory solution is to be found
in the concession of the fullest self-governing rights, since
these settlers are able to use them, and in the encouragement of
that sentiment of unity which we call the national spirit. And
this involves a recognition of the fact that nationality is never
to be defined solely in terms of race or language, but can arise,
and should be encouraged to arise, among racially divided
communities such as Canada and South Africa. Any attempt to
interpret nationhood in terms of race is not merely dangerous, but
ruinous; and such endeavours to stimulate or accentuate racial
conflict, as Germany has been guilty of in Brazil, in South
Africa, and even in America, must be, if successful, fatal to the
progress of the countries affected, and dangerous to the peace of
the world.

In the second place we have learnt that in lands of ancient

civilisation, where ruling castes have for centuries been in the
habit of exploiting their subjects, the supreme gift which Europe
can offer is that of internal peace and a firmly administered and
equal law, which will render possible the gradual rise of a sense
of unity, and the gradual training of the people in the habits of
life that make self-government possible. How soon national unity
can be established, or self-government made practicable in any
full sense, must be matter of debate. But the creation of these
things is, or ought to be, the ultimate aim of European government
in such countries. And in the meantime, and until they become
fully masters of their own fate, these lands, so our British
experience tells us, ought to be treated as distinct political
units; they should pay no tribute; all their resources should be
devoted to their own development; and they should not be expected
or required to maintain larger forces than are necessary for their
own defence. At the same time, the ruling power should claim no
special privileges for its own citizens, but should throw open the
markets of such realms equally to all nations. In short it should
act not as a master, but as a trustee, on behalf of its subjects
and also on behalf of civilisation.

In the third place we have learnt that in the backward regions of

the earth it is the duty of the ruling power, firstly, to protect
its primitive subjects from unscrupulous exploitation, to guard
their simple customs, proscribing only those which are immoral,
and to afford them the means of a gradual emancipation from
barbarism; secondly, to develop the economic resources of these
regions for the needs of the industrial world, to open them up by
modern communications, and to make them available on equal terms
to all nations, giving no advantage to its own citizens.

In spite of lapses and defects, it is an undeniable historical

fact that these are the principles which have been wrought out and
applied in the administration of the British Empire during the
nineteenth century. They are not vague and Utopian dreams; they
are a matter of daily practice. If they can be applied by one of
the world-states, and that the greatest, why should they not be
applied by the rest? But if these principles became universal, is
it not apparent that all danger of a catastrophic war between
these powers would be removed, since every reason for it would
have vanished? Thus the necessary and advantageous tutelage of
Europe over the non-European world, and the continuance of the
great world-states, could be combined with the conjuring away of
the ever-present terror of war, and with the gradual training of
the non-European peoples to enjoy the political methods of Europe;
while the lesser states without extra-European dominions need no
longer feel themselves stunted and reduced to economic dependence
upon their great neighbours. Thus, and thus alone, can the
benefits of the long development which we have traced be reaped in
full; thus alone can the dominion of the European peoples over the
world be made to mean justice and the chance for all peoples to
make the best of their powers.

But it is not only the principles upon which particular areas

outside of Europe should be governed which we must consider. We
must reflect also upon the nature of the relations that should
exist between the various members of these great world-empires,
which must hence-forward be the dominating factors in the world's
politics. And here the problem is urgent only in the case of the
British Empire, because it alone is developed to such a point that
the problem is inevitably raised. Whatever else may happen, the
war must necessarily bring a crisis in the history of the British
Empire. On a vastly greater scale the situation of 1763 is being
reproduced. Now, as then, the Empire will emerge from a war for
existence, in which mother and daughter lands alike have shared.
Now, as then, the strain and pressure of the war will have brought
to light deficiencies in the system of the Empire. Now, as then,
the most patent of these deficiencies will be the fact that,
generous as the self-governing powers of the great Dominions have
been, they still have limits; and the irresistible tendency of
self-government to work towards its own fulfilment will once more
show itself. For there are two spheres in which even the most
fully self-governing of the empire-nations have no effective
control: they do not share in the determination of foreign policy,
and they do not share in the direction of imperial defence. The
responsibility for foreign policy, and the responsibility, and
with it almost the whole burden, of organising imperial defence,
have hitherto rested solely with Britain. Until the Great War,
foreign policy seemed to be a matter of purely European interest,
not directly concerning the great Dominions; nor did the problems
of imperial defence appear very pressing or urgent. But now all
have realised that not merely their interests, but their very
existence, may depend upon the wise conduct of foreign relations;
and now all have contributed the whole available strength of their
manhood to support a struggle in whose direction they have had no
effective share. These things must henceforth be altered; and they
can be altered only in one or other of three ways. Either the
great Dominions will become independent states, as the American
colonies did, and pursue a foreign policy and maintain a system of
defence of their own; or the Empire must reshape itself as a sort
of permanent offensive and defensive alliance, whose external
policy and modes of defence will be arranged by agreement; or some
mode of common management of these and other questions must be
devised. The first of these solutions is unlikely to be adopted,
not only because the component members of the Empire are conscious
of their individual weakness, but still more because the memory of
the ordeal through which all have passed must form an indissoluble
bond. Yet rashness or high-handedness in the treatment of the
great issue might lead even to this unlikely result. If either of
the other two solutions is adopted, the question will at once
arise of the place to be occupied, in the league or in the
reorganised super-state, of all those innumerable sections of the
Empire which do not yet enjoy, and some of which may never enjoy,
the full privileges of self-government; and above all, the place
to be taken by the vast dominion of India, which though it is not,
and may not for a long time become, a fully self-governing state,
is yet a definite and vitally important unit in the Empire,
entitled to have its needs and problems considered, and its
government represented, on equal terms with the rest. The problem
is an extraordinarily difficult one; perhaps the most difficult
political problem that has ever faced the sons of men. But it is
essentially the same problem which has continually recurred in the
history of British imperialism, though it now presents itself on a
vastly greater scale, and in a far more complex form, than ever
before: it is the problem of reconciling unity with liberty and
variety; of combining nationality and self-government with
imperialism, without impairing the rights of either. And beyond
any doubt the most tremendous and fascinating political question
which now awaits solution in the world, is the question whether
the political instinct of the British peoples, and the genius of
self-government, will find a way out of these difficulties, as
they have found a way out of so many others. Patience, mutual
tolerance, willingness to compromise, will be required in the
highest measure if the solution is to be found; but these are the
qualities which self-government cultivates.

'A thing that is wholly a sham,' said Treitschke, speaking of the

British Empire, 'cannot in this world of ours, endure for ever.'
Why did this Empire appear to Treitschke to be 'wholly a sham'?
Was it not because it did not answer to any definition of the word
'Empire' to be found in German political philosophy; because it
did not mean dominion and uniformity, but liberty and variety;
because it did not rest upon Force, as, in his view, every firmly
established state must do; because it was not governed by a single
master, whose edicts all its subjects must obey? But for 'a thing
that is wholly a sham' men do not lay down their lives, in
thousands and in hundreds of thousands, not under the pressure of
compulsion, but by a willing self-devotion; for the defence of 'a
thing that is wholly a sham' men will not stream in from all the
ends of the earth, abandoning their families and their careers,
and offering without murmur or hesitation themselves and all they
have and are. There must be a reality in the thing that calls
forth such sacrifices, a reality of the kind to which Realpolitik,
with its concentration upon purely material concerns, is wholly
blind: it is the reality of an ideal of honour, and justice, and
freedom. And if the Germans have been deceived in their
calculations of Realpolitik, is it not perhaps because they have
learnt to regard honour, and justice, and freedom as 'things that
are wholly shams'?

This amazing political structure, which refuses to fall within any

of the categories of political science, which is an empire and yet
not an empire, a state and yet not a state, a super-nation
incorporating in itself an incredible variety of peoples and
races, is not a structure which has been designed by the ingenuity
of man, or created by the purposive action of a government; it is
a natural growth, the product of the spontaneous activity of
innumerable individuals and groups springing from among peoples
whose history has made liberty and the tolerance of differences
their most fundamental instincts; it is the outcome of a series of
accidents, unforeseen, but turned to advantage by the unfailing
and ever-new resourcefulness of men habituated to self-government.
There is no logic or uniformity in its system, which has arisen
from an infinite number of makeshifts and tentative experiments,
yet in all of these a certain consistency appears, because they
have been presided over by the genius of self-government. It is
distributed over every continent, is washed by every ocean,
includes half the dust of islands that Nature has scattered about
the seas of the world, controls almost all the main avenues of the
world's sea-going commerce, and is linked together by ten thousand
ships perpetually going to and fro. Weak for offensive purposes,
because its resources are so scattered, it is, except at a few
points, almost impregnable against attack, if its forces are well
organised. It includes among its population representatives of
almost every human race and religion, and every grade of
civilisation, from the Australian Bushman to the subtle and
philosophic Brahmin, from the African dwarf to the master of
modern industry or the scholar of universities. Almost every form
of social organisation and of government known to man is
represented in its complex and many-hued fabric. It embodies five
of the most completely self-governing communities which the world
has known, and four of these control the future of the great empty
spaces that remain for the settlement of white men. It finds place
for the highly organised caste system by which the teeming
millions of India are held together. It preserves the simple
tribal organisation of the African clans. To different elements
among its subjects this empire appears in different aspects. To
the self-governing Dominions it is a brotherhood of free nations,
co-operating for the defence and diffusion of common ideas and of
common institutions. To the ancient civilisations of India or of
Egypt it is a power which, in spite of all its mistakes and
limitations, has brought peace instead of turmoil, law instead of
arbitrary might, unity instead of chaos, justice instead of
oppression, freedom for the development of the capacities and
characteristic ideas of their peoples, and the prospect of a
steady growth of national unity and political responsibility. To
the backward races it has meant the suppression of unending
slaughter, the disappearance of slavery, the protection of the
rights and usages of primitive and simple folk against reckless
exploitation, and the chance of gradual improvement and
emancipation from barbarism. But to all alike, to one quarter of
the inhabitants of the world, it has meant the establishment of
the Reign of Law, and of the Liberty which can only exist under
its shelter. In some degree, though imperfectly as yet, it has
realised within its own body all the three great political ideas
of the modern world. It has fostered the rise of a sense of
nationhood in the young communities of the new lands, and in the
old and decaying civilisations of the most ancient historic
countries. It has given a freedom of development to self-
government such as history has never before known. And by linking
together so many diverse and contrasted peoples in a common peace,
it has already realised, for a quarter of the globe, the ideal of
internationalism on a scale undreamt of by the most sanguine
prophets of Europe.

Truly this empire is a fabric so wonderful, so many-sided, and so

various in its aspects, that it may well escape the rigid
categories of a German professor, and seem to him 'wholly a sham.'
Now is the crisis of its fate: and if the wisdom of its leaders
can solve the riddle of the Sphinx which is being put to them, the
Great War will indeed have brought, for a quarter of the world,
the culmination of modern history.

End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Expansion Of Europe, by Ramsay Muir