On the same day as the issue of the Manchester Guardian just quoted there appeared in the Times Literary Supplement a review of Canon C. H. Robinson's History of Christian Missions, "a very sound introduction to a vast and fascinating study." From this I gather that
there are few stories more romantic than the founding of the Uganda Christian Church in British East Africa. At first progress was very slow, and ... in 1890 there were scarcely 200 baptized Christians in the country; yet by 1913 those associated with the Christian Churches were little short of half a million.
So before Europe has shown many signs of convalescence, Africa is already virulently infected. And "our markets will yearly become of greater value."
§ 8
Restricted Sphere of Government corresponding to Restricted Sphere of Morality
But to return to our sheep, or rather to those who fleece them,—there is one cardinal proof that trade, in so far as it depends on private enterprise, is a danger to the State, and is recognised as such. It is that as soon as war comes, the nation in danger instinctively adopts whatever measure of Socialism can be introduced during the temporary inhibition of capitalistic methods. The actual coming of war induces a brief panic in the marketplace, and during this momentary paralysis of private acquisitors the State makes a desperate attempt to subdue their activities to its own needs. By the mere instinct of self-preservation it clutches at some rudiment of Socialism, and makes a diffident gesture in the direction of nationalisation—(of the railways, for instance). But the capitalists of England can point with pride to the fact that they very soon pulled themselves together. I hope to show in the following chapter that by the time the war was in full swing they had made it their own, and had banished every trace of socialism, with the relics of sanity and truth, to the confines of the Labour press.[31]
But still the danger was for the moment realised, and the attempt was made, the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to pull and squeeze and bind the institutions of capitalism into an organised system of political obligations. It failed because the very abuses and intemperances of our commercial system are a sign that the sphere of government has not expanded with the growing complications of the modern community. Nevertheless the attempt was made: but no corresponding effort is being made to extend the system of moral obligations in which we live.
For it is just as the sphere of morality is unduly restricted and fails to correspond to the needs of humanity, that, on the political plane, the unduly restricted sphere of government has never been extended to include all the interrelations of industrial citizenship. Capitalism is a survival of the penultimate stage of political development, as war is a survival of the penultimate stage of morality.
The attempts both spasmodic and continuous to extend the sphere of government, which now begin to affect nearly all serious legislation, must remain incomplete without an analogous and indeed corollary expansion of the moral system which will involve the obsolescence of war.