The Expansion Of Europe | Page 6

handed on, has made the
Reign of Law, and the modes of a single civilisation, the common
possession of the whole world. Rome made the common life of Europe
possible. The imperial expansion of the European nations has alone
made possible the vision--nay, the certainty--of a future world-order.
For these reasons we may rightly and without hesitation continue to

employ these terms, provided that we remember always that the
justification of any dominion imposed by a more advanced upon a
backward or disorganised people is to be found, not in the extension of
mere brute power, but in the enlargement and diffusion, under the
shelter of power, of those vital elements in the life of Western
civilisation which have been the secrets of its strength, and the greatest
of its gifts to the world: the sovereignty of a just and rational system of
law, liberty of person, of thought, and of speech, and, finally, where the
conditions are favourable, the practice of self-government and the
growth of that sentiment of common interest which we call the national
spirit. These are the features of Western civilisation which have
justified its conquest of the world [Footnote: See the first essay in
Nationalism and Internationalism, in which an attempt is made to work
out this idea]; and it must be for its success or failure in attaining these
ends that we shall commend or condemn the imperial work of each of
the nations which have shared in this vast achievement.
Four main motives can be perceived at work in all the imperial
activities of the European peoples during the last four centuries. The
first, and perhaps the most potent, has been the spirit of national pride,
seeking to express itself in the establishment of its dominion over less
highly organised peoples. In the exultation which follows the
achievement of national unity each of the nation-states in turn, if the
circumstances were at all favourable, has been tempted to impose its
power upon its neighbours,[Footnote: Nationalism and Imperialism, pp.
60, 64, 104.] or even to seek the mastery of the world. From these
attempts have sprung the greatest of the European wars. From them
also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states. It is no
mere coincidence that all the great colonising powers have been unified
nation-states, and that their imperial activities have been most vigorous
when the national sentiment was at its strongest among them. Spain,
Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia: these are the great imperial
powers, and they are also the great nation-states. Denmark and Sweden
have played a more modest part, in extra-European as in European
affairs. Germany and Italy only began to conceive imperial ambitions
after their tardy unification in the nineteenth century. Austria, which
has never been a nation-state, never became a colonising power.
Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for dominion, may be regarded as

the chief source of imperialism; and if its effects are unhappy when it
tries to express itself at the expense of peoples in whom the potentiality
of nationhood exists, they are not necessarily unhappy in other cases.
When it takes the form of the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the
organisation and development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the
reinvigoration and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may
prove itself a beneficent force. But it is beneficent only in so far as it
leads to an enlargement of law and liberty.
The second of the blended motives of imperial expansion has been the
desire for commercial profits; and this motive has played so prominent
a part, especially in our own time, that we are apt to exaggerate its
force, and to think of it as the sole motive. No doubt it has always been
present in some degree in all imperial adventures. But until the
nineteenth century it probably formed the predominant motive only in
regard to the acquisition of tropical lands. So long as Europe continued
to be able to produce as much as she needed of the food and the raw
materials for industry that her soil and climate were capable of yielding,
the commercial motive for acquiring territories in the temperate zone,
which could produce only commodities of the same type, was
comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas,
which we have come to regard as the most important products of the
imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be
mainly attributed to other than commercial motives. But Europe has
always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics: gold and
ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a very
early age found their way into Europe from India and the East, coming
by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of the Black Sea and
the Mediterranean. Until