France est un besoin des hommes.’ Villari, echoing the illustrious Gioberti, claims for Italy the primacy among nations. The Kaiser tells his people, ‘Der alte gute Gott has always been on our side.’ M. Podyedonostseff points to the freedom of Russia from the shibboleths of a decadent civilisation, and looks to the young and vigorous Slavonic stock as the residuary legatee of the treasures and conquests of the past. The Americans are not less confident than in the days of Martin Chuzzlewit that it is their mission to ‘run this globe’.” [47]
Nor are these barren sentiments; in various parts of the world they are inspiring young soldiers, politicians, and missionaries to a practical direction of the resources of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States towards territorial expansion.
We are now in a position to restate and test the scientific basis of Imperialism regarded as a world-policy. The maintenance of a military and industrial struggle for life and wealth among nations is desirable in order to quicken the vigour and social efficiency of the several competitors, and so to furnish a natural process of selection, which shall give an ever larger and intenser control over the government and the economic exploitation of the world into the hands of the nation or nations representing the highest standard of civilisation or social efficiency, and by the elimination or subjugation of the inefficient shall raise the standard of the government of humanity.
This statement withdraws the issue from the purely national, political, and from the distinctively ethical standpoints, referring it back to its scientific basis in the laws or analogies of biology.
Here we can profitably start from a statement of Professor G. Pearson. “History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If men want to