It is true that “social efficiency” seems to imply much more than mere fighting capacity in war and trade, and, if we were to take into account all qualities which go to make a good society, we should include much more; but from our present “natural history” standpoint it is evident that these must be excluded and only those included which aid directly in the struggle.
Giving, then, the proper value to the terms, it simply comes to this. “In the history of man, as throughout nature, stronger races have continually trampled down, enslaved, and exterminated other races.” The biologist says: “This is so rooted in nature, including human nature, that it must go on.” He adds: “It has been the prime condition and mode of progress in the past, therefore it is desirable it should go on. It must go on, it ought to go on.”
So easily we glide from natural history to ethics, and find in utility a moral sanction for the race struggle. Now, Imperialism is nothing but this natural history doctrine, regarded from the standpoint of one’s own nation. We represent the socially efficient nation, we have conquered and acquired dominion and territory in the past: we must go on, it is our destiny, one which is serviceable to ourselves and to the world, our duty.
Thus, emerging from natural history, the doctrine soon takes on a large complexity of ethical and religious finery, and we are wafted into an elevated atmosphere of “imperial Christianity,” a “mission of civilisation,” in which we are to teach “the arts of good government” and “the dignity of labour.”
II
That the power to do anything constitutes a right and even a duty to do it is perhaps the commonest, the most “natural” of temperamental fallacies. Even Professor Pearson does not avoid it, when, after an able