The Expansion Of Europe | Page 7

the end of the fifteenth century the European
trader had no direct contact with the sources of these precious
commodities; the supply of them was scanty and the price high. The
desire to gain a more direct access to the sources of this traffic, and to
obtain control of the supply, formed the principal motive for the great
explorations. But these, in their turn, disclosed fresh tropical areas
worth exploiting, and introduced new luxuries, such as tobacco and tea,
which soon took rank as necessities. They also brought a colossal
increment of wealth to the countries which had undertaken them. Hence
the acquisition of a share in, or a monopoly of, these lucrative lines of

trade became a primary object of ambition to all the great states. In the
nineteenth century Europe began to be unable to supply her own needs
in regard to the products of the temperate zone, and therefore to desire
control over other areas of this type; but until then it was mainly in
regard to the tropical or sub-tropical areas that the commercial motive
formed the predominant element in the imperial rivalries of the nation-
states. And even to-day it is over these areas that their conflicts are
most acute.
A third motive for imperial expansion, which must not be overlooked,
is the zeal for propaganda: the eagerness of virile peoples to propagate
the religious and political ideas which they have adopted. But this is
only another way of saying that nations are impelled upon the imperial
career by the desire to extend the influence of their conception of
civilisation, their Kultur. In one form or another this motive has always
been present. At first it took the form of religious zeal. The spirit of the
Crusaders was inherited by the Portuguese and the Spaniards, whose
whole history had been one long crusade against the Moors. When the
Portuguese started upon the exploration of the African coast, they could
scarcely have sustained to the end that long and arduous task if they
had been allured by no other prospect than the distant hope of finding a
new route to the East. They were buoyed up also by the desire to strike
a blow for Christianity. They expected to find the mythical Christian
empire of Prester John, and to join hands with him in overthrowing the
infidel. When Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Castile to supply
the means for his madcap adventure, it was by a double inducement
that he won her assent: she was to gain access to the wealth of the
Indies, but she was also to be the means of converting the heathen to a
knowledge of Christianity; and this double motive continually recurs in
the early history of the Spanish Empire. France could scarcely, perhaps,
have persisted in maintaining her far from profitable settlements on the
barren shores of the St. Lawrence if the missionary motive had not
existed alongside of the motives of national pride and the desire for
profits: her great work of exploration in the region of the Great Lakes
and the Mississippi Valley was due quite as much to the zeal of the
heroic missionaries of the Jesuit and other orders as to the enterprise of
trappers and traders. In English colonisation, indeed, the missionary
motive was never, until the nineteenth century, so strongly marked. But

its place was taken by a parallel political motive. The belief that they
were diffusing the free institutions in which they took so much pride
certainly formed an element in the colonial activities of the English. It
is both foolish and unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda
in the imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by the
colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial
expansion, as of other human activities, are mixed, and the loftier
elements in them are not often predominant. But the loftier elements
are always present. It is hypocrisy to pretend that they are alone or even
chiefly operative. But it is cynicism wholly to deny their influence.
And of the two sins cynicism is the worse, because by
over-emphasising it strengthens and cultivates the lower among the
mixed motives by which men are ruled.
The fourth of the governing motives of imperial expansion is the need
of finding new homes for the surplus population of the colonising
people. This was not in any country a very powerful motive until the
nineteenth century, for over-population did not exist in any serious
degree in any of the European states until that age. Many of the
political writers in seventeenth-century England, indeed, regarded the
whole movement of colonisation with alarm, because it seemed to be
drawing off men who could not be spared. But if the population was
nowhere excessive, there were in all countries certain