synthesis,” and while deploring, often in earnest, the necessity of the Maxim and the gunboat, find a glorious justification in the higher ends of a civilisation promoted by such means. The Western nations are, according to this gospel, rapidly realising a beneficent control of the earth which will, in the near future, secure general peace and the industrial, scientific, and moral supremacy of Western arts.
“Fly, happy, happy sails, and bear the Press, Fly, happy with the mission of the Cross, Knit land to land, and blowing heavenward, Enrich the markets of the golden year.”
This is the benevolent theory. Let Sir Charles Dilke’s estimate of our recent acquisitions in tropical Africa serve for commentary.
“If we cannot make the most fertile of the West India Islands pay, how can we expect to make countries which are far less healthy and less fertile in the very heart of Africa, return a profit? Our people have been interested in Africa through their traditional desire to suppress the evils of the slave trade, and to pay conscience money in these days for the sins, in connection with slavery, of their predecessors; but it is probable that we have done more harm by promoting the partition of Africa and the creation, in the name of liberty, of such governments as that of the Congo Free State than the harm which our grandfathers did to Africa by their participation in African slavery and the slave trade.” [63]
III
The psychical problem which confronts us in the advocates of the mission of Imperialism is certainly no case of hypocrisy, or of deliberate conscious simulation of false motives. It is partly the dupery of imperfectly realised ideas, partly a case of psychical departmentalism. Imperialism has been floated on a sea of vague, shifty, well-sounding phrases which are seldom tested by close contact with fact. “It is not in