The right of colonization is also recognized.  Vast territories inhabited by uncivilized masses are occupied by more highly civilized States, and made subject to their rule.  Higher civilization and the correspondingly greater power are the foundations of the right to annexation.  This right is, it is true, a very indefinite one, and it is impossible to determine what degree of civilization justifies annexation and subjugation.  The impossibility of finding a legitimate limit to these international relations has been the cause of many wars.  The subjugated nation does not recognize this right of subjugation, and the more powerful civilized nation refuses to admit the claim of the subjugated to independence.  This situation becomes peculiarly critical when the conditions of civilization have changed in the course of time.  The subject nation has, perhaps, adopted higher methods and conceptions of life, and the difference in civilization has consequently lessened.  Such a state of things is growing ripe in British India.

Lastly, in all times the right of conquest by war has been admitted.  It may be that a growing people cannot win colonies from uncivilized races, and yet the State wishes to retain the surplus population which the mother-country can no longer feed.  Then the only course left is to acquire the necessary territory by war.  Thus the instinct of self-preservation leads inevitably to war, and the conquest of foreign soil.  It is not the possessor, but the victor, who then has the right.  The threatened people will see the point of Goethe’s lines: 

  “That which them didst inherit from thy sires,
  In order to possess it, must be won.”

The procedure of Italy in Tripoli furnishes an example of such conditions, while Germany in the Morocco question could not rouse herself to a similar resolution.[C]

[Footnote C:  This does not imply that Germany could and ought to have occupied part of Morocco.  On more than one ground I think that it was imperative to maintain the actual sovereignty of this State on the basis of the Algeciras Convention.  Among other advantages, which need not be discussed here, Germany would have had the country secured to her as a possible sphere of colonization.  That would have set up justifiable claims for the future.]

In such cases might gives the right to occupy or to conquer.  Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war.  War gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things.

Just as increase of population forms under certain circumstances a convincing argument for war, so industrial conditions may compel the same result.