done by his Ministry to carry out the plan of Imperial consolidation, except the addition of the Imperial title to the dignity of the Crown and the abortive attempt to federate South Africa. The fight against cosmopolitanism was not avoided, and the demonstrations against Russia in Turkey and Afghanistan showed the fatal ease with which large conceptions of national importance degenerate into vulgarity. The new idea of Empire was thus early identified with national insolence and immorality.
The federation of self-governing dominions has not been the most striking feature of Imperialist policy since Disraeli. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century four and three-quarter millions of square miles of land and eighty-eight millions of human beings were added to the Empire, and of the latter only two millions were white people.[[343]] The primary object of all these extensions was not the incorporation of free peoples in a federal union, but the subjugation of weak peoples for the purposes of private profit. The British trader and the British capitalist who wanted security for his foreign investments were the pioneers of Empire, and in South Africa they succeeded, not only in incorporating, by methods often worse than dubious, races of barbarians, but in dragging the whole British people into a costly war for the annexation of two civilized Republics. Imperialism has not of set purpose extended liberty in any part of the globe. It has introduced order and justice into some unsettled tracks, it has provided capital for the development of neglected natural resources, and in South Africa it showed how readily it would subordinate the moral to the material interests of Empire. The only conspicuous extensions of liberty during the period of expansion have been made by Liberals, and in South Africa they acted in the face of almost unanimous protest from the Imperialist party. The successes of Imperialism have been material.
The steady deterioration which has taken place in the ideals of Imperialism has already been indicated. Its moral failure
is due simply to the fact that the object of expansion was never in any case moral. Incidentally, as in India, Egypt, and Nigeria, an enlightened bureaucracy has avoided the blunders of exploitation and oppression. But for the most part, the best that can be said of our rule is that it is disinterested. Little has been done, even in India, to train and develop the higher faculties of the natives, and it is only in the Liberal reforms of Lord Morley that definite steps towards self-government have been taken. We are in these countries frankly to maintain order and to produce wealth, and for the most part we attempt nothing else. Benefits to the natives are only incidental and not primary. Unquestionably the growth of the Empire has extended the advantages of civilization to backward and uncultivated districts. But it has been promoted by the zeal of the investor rather than of the missionary. The enormous growth of wealth required new fields for investment. Visions of national grandeur were employed to direct the common people from the social reforms which would have reduced this wealth. The Press, the pulpit, and the platform united to represent the material pursuit of gain as a disinterested labour on behalf of humanity. A mist of moral enthusiasm was wrapped about the crude realities of commercial enterprise, and the acquisition of wealth by private persons was disguised in the trappings of national magnificence. Much honest enthusiasm was thus generated which commercial and financial magnates turned to their advantage. But in the face of temptation the artificial structure collapsed. National egoism and cupidity have now converted the organization for the distribution of blessings into an organization for the monopolizing of profits. The Empire is to-day regarded by Imperialists as essentially national, and not as essentially international. It is to be surrounded by a tariff for the exclusion of the foreign trader, and it is to be organized as a gigantic weapon against those nations with which, for the time being, we happen to be at variance.
This conception of Empire has grown with those false applications of evolutionary theory to which reference has been previously
made. The objects of the organization of the State having ceased to be moral, it has ceased to be moral in its methods of working. International morality is flung away with the other rules of conduct, and material success becomes the sole justification of public action. "As a nation we are brought up to feel it a disgrace to succeed by falsehood; the word 'spy' conveys in it something as repulsive as slave. We will keep hammering away with the conviction that honesty is the best policy, and that truth always wins in the long run. These pretty little sentences do well enough for a child's pocket-book, but the man who acts upon them in war had better sheathe his sword for ever."[[344]] Out of success, by whatever methods it may be achieved, this school proposes to acquire the desirable human qualities. By warfare, and warfare only, whether it be military or diplomatic, is it possible for a people to develop and to retain strength, courage, and resource. Those nations which survive in this perpetual conflict are presumed, in the Darwinian phrase, to be the "fittest." Survival justifies itself. Success is the test of virtue, and the steps by which it is obtained may be safely ignored. The gross fallacies of this process of argument have been sufficiently dealt with by other hands.[[345]] It is only necessary here to suggest the Liberal answer. A State is not an individual. It is simply an expression of the ideas of a human society, or aggregation of human beings. The morals of a State are nothing but the morals of its individual members. To say that morality must be observed by those members in their dealings with each other, but not in their collective dealings with the members of other States, is to weaken private and not public morality. Public morality is not distinguishable from private. The man who abstains from stealing his neighbour's goods cannot, without personal deterioration, join his neighbours in appropriating the territory of another
nation. Morality has gradually spread from organizations within the State till it includes all persons within the State. In the remote past, morality was observed only in dealings between members of the same family. Strangers took their chance. At a later date it was extended to the tribe, or the village, or the Church, and finally to all subjects of the same central government. There is no reason for stopping the operation of moral rules at the Straits of Dover, that would not prevent an Englishman from dealing honourably with a Scotchman, or a Churchman from dealing honourably with a Dissenter. Morality must be universal, or it ceases to be morality. The argument thus outlined must be fatal to evolutionary Imperialism. Qualities cannot be developed in nations. They can only be developed in the individuals who compose those nations. To speak of a strong and virile State is to obscure the issue. Strong and virile States can only be those which are maintained by strong and virile human beings. States which "survive" by the exercise of force and fraud can only be those whose subjects have ceased to dislike force and fraud. In other words, the evolution of the individual and the evolution of the State cannot proceed upon different lines. Man has now reached a point of development where mere brute strength has ceased to be a desirable quality. The test of a man is always a moral test. We have evolved morality. If we formally reject morality in our use of the State, for the express purpose, as it were, of "breeding it out," we deliberately turn back the course of human evolution. The State will react upon the individual, and the individual will suffer. We cannot select certain qualities for individuals, and certain others for States, and suppose that evolution can be directed towards the development of both together.
British Imperialism, thus strengthening its natural tendency to egoism by the assimilation of scientific theory, has been only a local manifestation of an almost universal tendency. The career of Bismarck in Germany formed an excellent example of the operation of the same principles. Germany consolidated, France and Austria humiliated, and territory snatched from France and
Denmark have invested the gospel of "State might is State right" with a lustre which conceals the deterioration of private morals, the distresses of the common people, and the profound social unrest, which this costly parade has brought in its train. Men and women as individuals may sometimes escape the Nemesis which waits on immorality. Nations can never die, and the debt incurred by one generation must always be paid by its successor. Only a short view of German history can fail to see the dangers which the policy of Bismarck has brought upon his country. The reaction of Russian policy upon the internal state of Russia is more obvious, and the case of Great Britain is hardly less clear. But for the moment, Imperialism is the fashion at home and abroad. The earth is parcelled out among the Powers. England, Germany, and France share Africa between them. Austria covets and by instalments obtains territory in the Balkans. Russia is thrust out of Manchuria, and compensates herself in Mongolia and Persia. All join in wresting concessions of territory and financial opportunities from China, and even the United States takes her colonies from Spain. In all parts of the earth the Powers are thus brought into new competition. The Balance of Power is revived, but for investors and not for dynasties. The struggle is for opportunities for the private acquisition of wealth, rather than opportunities for the public control of territory. But the result is the same. Obligations are indefinitely extended. The risks of conflict are indefinitely increased. The burden of armaments grows larger every year. The common people are more and more removed from the decision of the most far-reaching public questions, and know little more of the things which may decide their fate than is forced upon them by the weight of their taxes and the advice which they receive from their governors for the direction of their national antipathies.
British Imperialism came to a head in the South African War. Since the troubles of 1880 the condition of the Transvaal had greatly changed. The discovery of gold had caused an enormous flow of immigrants, mostly of British descent. The