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,[2] 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.

[2] Nationalism and Imperialism, pp. 60, 64, 104.

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 com