ld never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of
the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and
cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our
fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on
wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have
not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character,
to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together
with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the
relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their
own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the
commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas,
form an inseparable part.

It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward
races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise
rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by
pointing to the facts of the world as we know it--to the existing
colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the
powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still
be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed
large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of
governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the
nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit
that it was; just as the exponents of _laissez-faire_ were slow to
admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at
home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the
inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed,
is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer
remarks,[57]

breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing under
the plea that every people must be left free to manage its
own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat
the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic
world which protested against any interference by the State
to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of
employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted
interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom
of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from
entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some