They were usually dynastic.  They depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying actual possession of another country and all its population.  There was always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir against that heir, as though the destinies of nationality could be settled by a strip of parchment or a love-affair with a princess.  People grew so accustomed to this folly that even now we hardly realise its absurdity.  Yet I suppose if the King of Spain left his kingdom by will to his well-beloved cousin George of England, not an English wherry would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons.  Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war.  Something is gained.  We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives of conquest.

In the extension and maintenance of our own Empire all previous motives have been combined.  We have pleaded want of space; we have sought slaves either for export or for local labour; we have sought plunder and also trade or “markets”; we have sought dumping-grounds for our wasters, and careers for our public school-boys; like the Turks and Spaniards, we have sought to promote the knowledge of God by the slaughter and enslavement of His creatures; like the Romans, we have thought it our manifest duty to paint the world red and rule it.  But within the last sixty or seventy years we have added the further motive most aptly expressed by the late King Leopold of Belgium in the document by which he obtained his rights over the Congo:  I mean “the moral and material amelioration” of the subject peoples.  That was a motive unknown to the ancients, though the Romans came near it when they granted equal citizenship to all provincials—­a measure far in advance of any concession of ours.  And it was unknown to the Middle Ages, though Turks and Spaniards came near it when they destroyed the infidels for their good and opened heaven to converted slaves and corpses.  To subjugate a nationality for its own moral and material advantage is something almost new in history.  It sounds the true modern note.  That is not a pleasant note, but it is a sign of change, an evidence of hope.  In the Boer War our real objects were to paint the country red on the maps and to exploit the gold-mines.  But some people said we were fighting for equal rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me “the Boers wanted washing.”  Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical, but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue.  They were a recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed.  They exposed the hypocrites themselves to the retort of serious and innocent people:  “Very well, then.  If these were your motives, give equal rights, protect the natives, Christianise the Boers, wash them if you