follow at the tail of our vocabulary. International politics are still dominated by terms applicable to conditions which the processes of modern life have altogether abolished.
In the Roman times—indeed, in all the ancient world—it may have been true that the conquest of a territory meant a tangible advantage to the conqueror; it meant the exploitation of the conquered territory by the conquering State itself, to the advantage of that State and its citizens. It not infrequently meant the enslavement of the conquered people and the acquisition of wealth in the form of slaves as a direct result of the conquering war. In mediæval times a war of conquest meant at least immediate tangible booty in the shape of movable property, actual gold and silver, land parcelled out among the chiefs of the conquering nation, as it was at the Norman Conquest, and so forth.
At a later period conquest at least involved an advantage to the reigning house of the conquering nation, and it was mainly the squabbles of rival sovereigns for prestige and power which produced the wars of many centuries.
At a still later period, civilization, as a whole—not necessarily the conquering nation—gained (sometimes) by the conquest of savage peoples, in that order was substituted for disorder. In the period of the colonization of newly-discovered land, the preemption of territory by