on and maintenance of our own Empire all previous motives
have been combined. We have pleaded want of space; we have sought slaves
either for export or for local labour; we have sought plunder and also
trade or "markets"; we have sought dumping-grounds for our wasters, and
careers for our public school-boys; like the Turks and Spaniards, we
have sought to promote the knowledge of God by the slaughter and
enslavement of His creatures; like the Romans, we have thought it our
manifest duty to paint the world red and rule it. But within the last
sixty or seventy years we have added the further motive most aptly
expressed by the late King Leopold of Belgium in the document by which
he obtained his rights over the Congo: I mean "the moral and material
amelioration" of the subject peoples. That was a motive unknown to the
ancients, though the Romans came near it when they granted equal
citizenship to all provincials--a measure far in advance of any
concession of ours. And it was unknown to the Middle Ages, though Turks
and Spaniards came near it when they destroyed the infidels for their
good and opened heaven to converted slaves and corpses. To subjugate a
nationality for its own moral and material advantage is something almost
new in history. It sounds the true modern note. That is not a pleasant
note, but it is a sign of change, an evidence of hope. In the Boer War
our real objects were to paint the country red on the maps and to
exploit the gold-mines. But some people said we were fighting for equal
rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some
thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me "the Boers
wanted washing." Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical,
but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue. They were a
recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed. They
exposed the hypocrites themselves to the retort of serious and innocent
people: "Very well, then. If these were your motives, give equal rights,
protect the natives, Christianise the Boers, wash them if you can." It
is a retort against which hypocrisy cannot long stand out. It proves
that a new standard of judgment is slowly forming in the world. But for
this new standard, where would be the Congo agitation, or the movement
against the Portuguese cocoa slavery, or such sympathy as exists with
the Nationalists of India, Egypt, and Persia? When the doctrines of
equal rights or even of moral and mat