; in the centuries to come, we will go into these moral
questions at our leisure.

This submission of ethical ideals to economic needs is illustrated in
the prevailing colonial labour policy, which reveals with clarity the
quality and power of the economic impulse to imperialism. The great
industrial nations, having reached the economic stage in which an ample
labour supply can be secured without other compulsion than that of
hunger, accept at home the ideal of a free labour contract, with a
certain protection to the wage-earner. In their colonies, however,
though they may wish to be fair to the natives, one form or another of
forced labour is generally adopted. An African native, who wants
little here below and can get that little easily, is compelled to
neglect or surrender his diminutive banana patch or farm and come to
the European's plantation or mine, or work for nothing or next to
nothing on the public roads. Either this compulsion is exerted by
means of a heavy hut tax, the money to pay which can be obtained only
by wage-labour, or by stringent vagrancy laws, or by a refusal to allow
the natives to become independent proprietors, or by outright
expropriation. In some colonies penal labour contracts are enforced,
and the miserable native who breaks his agreement is imprisoned or
flogged. Credit bondage is also in favour, and no sooner does the
native work off his original indebtedness than he finds that he is more
in {95} debt than ever. Finally if the natives cannot be compelled to
give enough labour, coolies are imported, chiefly from China and India,
and after their period of service are expatriated.

Even a more direct pressure is not always wanting. While the
imperialistic nations theoretically oppose slavery, and have rather
effectively checked the horrible slave trade of the Arabs, they
themselves have not always escaped the temptation to introduce slavery
under new forms. At various times and in various colonies, the
_corvee_ has been adopted both for public and private works, and in the
Belgian Congo a thinly disguised slavery in its most atrocious form has
been adopted. To justify this European slavery, which is infinitely
more brutal than was the mild and customary native slavery, the same
ethical and religious arguments are advanced as were utilised by the
sixteenth century Spaniards in establishing their _encomiendas_. The
natives, especially in Africa, are lumped together as worthless id