Imperialism is bad because it is based on conquest, implies a "subject race," and sooner or later will have to be maintained by war. It breeds a conquering and commercial spirit, which is never satisfied unless it is carrying some one else's burden (at a high freight). The imperialist plutocracy will then find itself so much occupied with other people's affairs that it will be neglecting domestic politics altogether: and this neglect will be the more disastrous in so far as poverty and servitude will have increased at the same rate as luxury. The citizens of an Imperialist state will be unable to control their commercial masters, and, as Rousseau said of the English, will soon find themselves a nation of slaves[82]: and that not only because a policy of conquest is incompatible with democracy; but also because the lust of conquest and the arrogance of
[Footnote 78: H. N. Brailsford (_The War of Steel and Gold_, p. 125) speaks of an "indifferent democracy." Unhappily our democracy is not indifferent to Imperialism, for it is misled to believe that mere expansion is somehow grand and good; the only geography it learns at school is miscalled "patriotic" because it is designed to encourage this belief.]
[Footnote 79: I.e. as a real "Empire," the British Empire was a failure, as all Empires must be. It has been a success since it ceased to be an Empire about a hundred years ago. Cf. Professor H. E. Egerton's remark:--
"The British Colonial Empire of to-day is not the Empire which was the outcome of seventeenth-century methods. So far as the colonists themselves were concerned, English colonisation (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) was a complete success, but from the point of view of the mother country it was a failure, and the rock on which it foundered was the same rock which lost America to Spain and caused Canada to acquiesce in separation from France."]
[Footnote 80: I am ashamed to say that when I wrote these chapters I had not read Mr. H. N. Brailsford's _War of Steel and Gold_. But Mr. Brailsford's brilliant examination of the connection between War and Finance is quite consistent with my supplementary theory of War and Trade. "Trade supplies no explanation of Imperialism," says Mr. Brailsford (p. 75). It does, in so far as Traders support Imperialism because they think it is good for Trade: while financiers, as Mr. Brailsford shows, support Imperialism because they know it is good for investments.]
