opened up to our trade and capital the nucleus of an outlander population is formed. Hence, of necessity, springs up a crop of political issues, an outlander problem: the British outlanders not satisfied with the foreign rule demand the intervention of their home Government. Thus the duty of protecting British subjects in a foreign country is identified with the duty of protecting British property, not merely the personal property of the outlanders, often a trivial matter, but the far larger stakes of the home investors. But apart from these cases of special interest, wherever any considerable number of British subjects settles in a savage or semi-civilised country they have a “right” to British protection, and since that protection can seldom be made effective without the exercise of direct British authority, the imperial ægis of Great Britain must be spread over all such areas, when a convenient occasion for such expansion presents itself.
Such is the accepted theory and practice. What validity does it possess as an argument for recent imperial expansion? Let me first ask: Is England over-populated now, and is the prospect of further increase such as to compel us to “peg out claims for posterity” in other parts of the world? The facts are these. Great Britain is not so thickly populated as certain prosperous industrial areas in Germany, the Netherlands, and China: along with every recent growth of population has come a far greater growth of wealth and of the power to purchase food and other subsistence. The modern specialisation of industry has caused a congestion of population upon certain spots which may be injurious in some ways to the well-being of the nation, but it cannot be regarded as over-population in the sense of a people outgrowing the means of subsistence. Nor have we reason to fear such over-population in the future. It is true that our manufactures and commerce may not continue to grow as rapidly as in the past, though we have no clear warrant from industrial statistics for this judgment: but if this be so, neither is our population likely to increase so fast. Of this we have clear statistical evidence: the diminution of the rate of growth of our population, as