ineteenth century were actuated by a spirit
far more enlightened than that of former times, when the early colonial
empires of Spain, Portugal, Holland, and the English East India Company
had been run on the brutal and short-sighted doctrine of sheer
exploitation. In the nineteenth century all Western rule in the Orient
was more or less impregnated with the ideal of "The White Man's Burden."
The great empire-builders of the nineteenth century, actuated as they
were not merely by self-interest and patriotic ambition but also by a
profound sense of obligation to improve the populations which they had
brought under their country's sway, felt themselves bearers of Western
enlightenment and laboured to diffuse all the benefits of Western
civilization. They honestly believed that the extension of Western
political control was the best and quickest, perhaps the only, means of
modernizing the backward portions of the world.

That standpoint is ably presented by a British "liberal imperialist,"
Professor Ramsay Muir, who writes: "It is an undeniable fact that the
imperialism of the European peoples has been the means whereby European
civilization has been in some degree extended to the whole world, so
that to-day the whole world has become a single economic unit, and all
its members are parts of a single political system. And this achievement
brings us in sight of the creation of a world-order such as the wildest
dreamers of the past could never have anticipated. Without the
imperialism of the European peoples North and South America, Australia,
South Africa, must have remained wildernesses, peopled by scattered
bands of savages. Without it India and other lands of ancient
civilization must have remained, for all we can see, externally subject
to that endless succession of wars and arbitrary despotisms which have
formed the substance of their history through untold centuries, and
under which neither rational and equal law nor political liberty, as we
conceive them, were practicable conceptions. Without it the backward
peoples of the earth must have continued to stagnate under the dominance
of an unchanging primitive customary regime, which has been their state
throughout recorded time. If to-day the most fruitful political ideas of
the West--the ideas of nationality and self-government--which are purely
products of Western civilization, are beginning to produce a healthy
fermentation in many parts of the non-European world, that