ay well be benefited by more orderly and
progressive government. Submission to such a government is necessary as
a condition of subsequent political development. The majority of Asiatic
and African communities can only got a fair start politically by some
such preliminary process of tutelage; and the assumption by a European
nation of such a responsibility in a desirable phase of national
discipline and a frequent source of genuine national advance.

Neither does an aggressive colonial policy make for unnecessary or
meaningless wars. It is true, of course, that colonial expansion
increases the number of possible occasions for dispute among the
expanding nations; but these disputes have the advantage of rarely
turning on questions really vital to the future prosperity of a European
nation. They are just the sort of international differences of interest
which ought to be settled by arbitration or conciliation, because both
of the disputants have so much more to lose by hostilities than they
have to gain by military success. A dispute turning upon a piece of
African territory would, if it waxed into war, involve the most awful
and dangerous consequences in Europe. The danger of European wars,
except for national purposes of prime importance, carries its
consequence into Africa and Asia. France, for instance, was very much
irritated by the continued English occupation of Egypt in spite of
certain solemn promises of evacuation; and the expedition of Marchand,
which ended in the Fashoda incident, indirectly questioned the validity
of the British occupation of Egypt by making that occupation
strategically insecure. In spite, however, of the deliberate manner in
which France raised this question and of the highly irritated condition
of French public opinion, she could not, when the choice had to be made,
afford the consequences of a Franco-English war. In the end she was
obliged to seek compensation elsewhere in Africa and abandon her
occupation of Fashoda. This incident is typical; and it points directly
to the conclusion that wars will very rarely occur among European
nations over disputes as to colonies, unless the political situation in
Europe is one which itself makes war desirable or inevitable. A Bismarck
could handle a Fashoda incident so as to provoke hostilities, but in
that case Fashoda, like the Hohenzollern candidacy in Spain, would be a
pretext, not a cause. The one contemporary instance in which a
difference of c