the islands of the Pacific. The
control of Europe over the non-European world was in a single
generation completed and confirmed. And the most important of the many
questions raised by this development was the question whether the
spirit in which this world-supremacy of Europe was to be wielded should
be the spirit which long experience had inspired in the oldest of the
colonising nations, the spirit of trusteeship on behalf of
civilisation; or whether it was to be the old, brutal, and sterile
spirit of mere domination for its own sake.

On a superficial view the most obvious feature of this strenuous period
was that all the remaining unexploited regions of the world were either
annexed by one or other of the great Western states, or were driven to
adopt, with greater or less success, the modes of organisation of the
West. But what was far more important than any new demarcation of the
map was that not only the newly annexed lands, but also the
half-developed territories of earlier European dominions, were with an
extraordinary devouring energy penetrated during this generation by
European traders and administrators, equipped with railways,
steam-boats, and all the material apparatus of modern life, and in
general organised and exploited for the purposes of industry and trade.
This astonishing achievement was almost as thorough as it was swift.
And its result was, not merely that the political control of Europe
over the backward regions of the world was strengthened and secured by
these means, but that the whole world was turned into a single economic
and political unit, no part of which could henceforth dwell in
isolation. This might have meant that we should have been brought
nearer to some sort of world-order; but unhappily the spirit in which
the great work was undertaken by some, at least, of the nations which
participated in it has turned this wonderful achievement into a source
of bitterness and enmity, and led the world in the end to the tragedy
and agony of the Great War.

The causes of this gigantic outpouring of energy were manifold. The
main impelling forces were perhaps economic rather than political. But
the economic needs of this strenuous age might have been satisfied
without resort to the brutal arbitrament of war: their satisfaction
might even have been made the means of diminishing the danger of war.
It was the interpretation of these economic needs in terms of an
unhappy political theory which has