and only quite recently South Africa – the rest he virtually ignores. Yet the Imperialism which is our chief concern, the expansion of the last quarter of a century, and the further expansion to which we may be tempted in the early future, has nothing in common with Canada and Australasia, and very little with “white man’s Africa.”
When Lord Rosebery uttered his famous words about “a free, tolerant and unaggressive Empire,” he can scarcely have had in mind our vast recent encroachments in West and Central Africa, in the Soudan, on the Burmese frontier, or in Matabeleland. But the distinction between genuine Colonialism and Imperialism, important in itself, is vital when we consider their respective relations to domestic policy.
Modern British colonialism has been no drain upon our material and moral resources, because it has made for the creation of free white democracies, a policy of informal federation, of decentralisation, involving no appreciable strain upon the governmental faculties of Great Britain. Such federation,