on, and to look upon their subject-peoples merely as providing
the implements for a war of destruction, to be waged by cut-throat
commercial rivalry in time of peace, and by man-power and machine-power
in war. If that should be the result of all our agonies, the burden
which must be laid upon the peoples of these empires, and the
intolerable anticipation of what is to come, will make their yoke seem
indeed a heavy one; will probably bring about their disintegration; and
will end that ascendancy of Western civilisation over the world which
the last four centuries have established. And justly; since Western
civilisation will thus be made to stand not for justice and liberty,
but for injustice and oppression. Such must be the inevitable result of
any settlement of the non-European world which is guided merely by the
ambitions of a few rival states and the Doctrine of Power.

On the other hand, we are urged by enthusiasts for liberty, especially
in Russia, to believe that imperialism as such is the enemy; that we
must put an end for ever to all dominion exercised by one people over
another; and that outside of Europe as within it we must trust to the
same principles for the hope of future peace--the principles of
national freedom and self-government--and leave all peoples everywhere
to control freely their own destinies. But this is a misreading of the
facts as fatal as the other. It disregards the value of the work that
has been done in the extension of European civilisation to the rest of
the world by the imperial activities of the European peoples. It fails
to recognise that until Europe began to conquer the world neither
rational law nor political liberty had ever in any real sense existed
in the outer world, and that their dominion is even now far from
assured, but depends for its maintenance upon the continued tutelage of
the European peoples. It fails to realise that the economic demands of
the modern world necessitate the maintenance of civilised
administration after the Western pattern, and that this can only be
assured, in large regions of the earth, by means of the political
control of European peoples. Above all this view does not grasp the
essential fact that the idea of nationhood and the idea of
self-government are both modern ideas, which have had their origin in
Europe, and which can only be realised among peoples of a high
political development; that the sense of nationhood is but slowly
created, and must