‘Oh, my good friend, your motto should be “distance no object,” if you want to get on. But is there nothing nearer?’
‘Well, there is another—only eighty miles off; but that’s worse—dead coral without the bones.’
‘You are certainly unfortunate. But I should protect these places, all the same, and leave a garrison. Never tell me! if you push on far enough, you must come to something to fight at last. Providence can hardly have meant you to be shut up in this place without an enemy in the world. Only take care, when you do come within touch of your fellow creatures, to have a weapon in your hand.’
The girl shuddered.—‘More killing!’
‘You’ve got to find your excuse for hitting ’em, even then,’ he said.
‘Oh, insist on protecting them, and that will do.’
‘But how are you to find an excuse for that?’
‘Why you seize one place to-day, to make good your hold on another that you seized yesterday; and to-morrow you seize one place more, for the same reason. It is a process known as “inevitable expansion”; and if only you follow it out logically, it leads you all round the world.’
‘But where’s the good?’
‘It employs your young men and your bolder spirits; it doubles the wealth and the luxury of your capitalists; it leaves even a few more crusts from their table for your poor; and it provides a receptacle for your overflow of destitution when the crusts give out. In earlier days, when this system of main drainage on the colonial system was almost unknown, Nature had periodically to step in with a Black Death or a Plague to clear the heaps of human refuse away.’