countries to the general trade of Western industrial nations; our recent ventures have been more expensive and less profitable to us than the earlier ones, and any further labours of expansion seem to conform to a law of diminishing returns, yielding smaller and more precarious increments of trade to a larger outlay of material and intellectual capital. Have we not reached, or even passed, the limit of the most profitable outlay of our national energy and resources? Will not enlightened self-interest impel us to leave to other active and ambitious nations – France, Russia, Germany, America – the work of developing new tropical or sub-tropical countries? If it is necessary that Western industrial civilisation shall undertake the political and commercial management of the whole world, let these nations take their share. Why should we do all the work and get so little from it? On the assumption that backward countries must be developed by foreign countries for the general good, a reasonable economy of power will apportion the work which remains to the “Imperialism” of other nations. Even if these other nations were disposed to shirk their share, it would pay us better to persuade them to undertake it rather than further to load our overladen shoulders. Since these other nations are not only eager to do their share, but by their jealousy at our undertaking their work continually threaten to wreck the peace of Europe, it seems sheer madness for Great Britain to weaken herself politically and financially by any further process of expansion.
APPENDIX National Expenditure and Armaments Part I, Chapter VI
Top of the page