their lot or more harmful to our national repute than the “toughs” who devour our subject races and stand in photographic attitudes for Mr. Kipling to slobber over.  These scoundrels and wasters are a far worse evil than most people think, for they erect a false ideal which easily corrupts youth with its attraction, and they furnish ready instruments for land-grabbers and company directors, as is too often seen in their onslaughts upon Zulus, Basutos, and other half-savage peoples whom they desire to exterminate or enslave.  They are a singularly poisonous by-product of Empire, all the more poisonous for their brag; and though they belong to the class whom their relations gladly contribute to emigrate, they are far worse employed in debauching and plundering our so-called fellow-subjects in Africa than they would be in the public-houses, gambling-dens, pigeon-shooting enclosures, workhouses, and jails of their native land.  Of course, it is very useful to have dumping-grounds for our wasters, and it is pleasant to reflect upon the seven thousand miles of sea between one’s self and one’s worthless nephew, but a dumping-ground for nepotism can scarcely be considered the noblest aim of conquest.

Why is it, then, that one nation desires to subjugate another at all?  Sometimes the object has simply been space—­the pressure of population upon the extent of ground.  Pastoral and nomad hordes, like the “Barbarians” and Tartars, have had that object, but, as a rule, it has ended in their own absorption.  The motives of the Roman Empire were strangely mixed.  Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great incentives.  The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen like Sulla or Caesar were among the aims of many conquests.  The extension of religion had little to do with it, for the Romans had the decency to keep their gods to themselves and never slaughtered in the name of Jove.  But they were compelled to Empire by a peculiar conviction of destiny.  They did not destroy or subdue other peoples so much for glory as from a sense of duty.  It was their Heaven-sent mission to rule.  Their poet advised other nations to occupy themselves with wisdom, learning, statuary, the arts, or what other trivialities they pleased; it was the Roman’s task to hold the world in sway.  To the Roman the object of Empire was Empire.  It seemed to him the natural thing to conquer every other nation, making the world one Rome.  That was, in fact, his true religion, and we can but congratulate him on the unshaken faith of his self-esteem.  The Turk, on the other hand, who was the next Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws or race.  He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete equality of earthly squalor.  The motives of mediaeval and more recent conquests were the strangest of all.