Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 443

other European peoples have begun to take part in the exploitation of the world, and the British trader and capitalist have come into competition with those of other nationalities, in a process in which all the countries of the world tend to come into a common market to compete for a falling margin of profit, another development has followed. The British trader in the new circumstances has found himself confronted with rivals whose methods were more frankly barbarous than his own,—and yet, withal, engaged with them in a competitive process of exploitation necessarily governed in the last resort at the level of its lowest factor. The results in the long-run have tended, as might be expected, still more surely to outrage the general conscience at home. They have, therefore, even more directly, operated to drag the influence of the home government at the heels of trade in other lands; and the stage of non-interference has in this case also, and still more rapidly, tended to pass over into that of direct political control.

It has been, in short, a process in which the expansion of the British empire has continued without thought; without defined responsibility ; almost without consent. In it we see, as it were, the collective consciousness of the British peoples halting between the governing principles of two distinct epochs of the world’s evolution; on the one hand repudiating, with consistency and intention under the ruling standards of the Manchester school, the whole theory of empire, of government, and of responsibility in relation to the peoples with whom it came into contact in the processes of trade.