tion 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
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