itable fields for their
enterprises, not in their own colonies, which they have on the whole
tended to neglect, but in a far greater degree in South and Central
America, and in India and the other vast territories of the British
Empire, which have been open to them as freely as to British merchants.
All that the prosperity of European industry required was that the
sources of supply should be under efficient administration, and that
access to them should be open. And these conditions were fulfilled,
before the great rush began, over the greater part of the earth. If in
1878, when the European nations suddenly awoke to the importance of the
non-European world, they had been able to agree upon some simple
principle which would have secured equal treatment to all, how
different would have been the fate of Europe and the world! If it could
have been laid down, as a principle of international law, that in every
area whose administration was undertaken by a European state, the 'open
door' should be secured for the trade of all nations equally, and that
this rule should continue in force until the area concerned acquired
the status of a distinctly organised state controlling its own fiscal
system, the industrial communities would have felt secure, the little
states quite as fully as the big states. Moreover, since, under these
conditions, the annexation of territory by a European state would not
have threatened the creation of a monopoly, but would have meant the
assumption of a duty on behalf of civilisation, the acrimonies and
jealousies which have attended the process of partition would have been
largely conjured away. In 1878 such a solution would have presented few
difficulties. For at that date the only European state which controlled
large undeveloped areas was Britain; and Britain, as we have seen, had
on her own account arrived at this solution, and had administered, as
she still administers, all those regions of her Empire which do not
possess self-governing rights in the spirit of the principle we have
suggested.

Why was it that this solution, or some solution on these lines, was not
then adopted, and had no chance of being adopted? It was because the
European states, and first and foremost among them Germany, were still
dominated by a political theory which forbade their taking such a view.
We may call this theory the Doctrine of Power. It is the doctrine that
the highest duty of every state is to aim at the exten