ether 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.

V

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 t