Territorial expansion is always preceded by an extension of the circle of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration.  The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers.  Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence.  Japanese fishing boats preceded Japanese colonists to the coasts of Yezo.  Trading fleets were the forerunners of the Greek colonies along the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and of Phoenician settlements in North Africa, Sicily and Spain.  It was in the wake of trapper and fur trader that English and American pioneer advanced across our continent to the Pacific; just as in French Canada Jesuit priest and voyageur opened the way for the settler.  Religious propaganda was yoked with greed of conquest in the campaigns of Cortez and Pizarro.  Modern statesmen pushing a policy of expansion are alive to the diplomatic possibilities of missionaries endangered or their property destroyed.  They find a still better asset to be realized on territorially in enterprising capitalists settled among a weaker people, by whom their property is threatened or overtaxed, or their trade interfered with.  The British acquisition of Hongkong in 1842 followed a war with China to prevent the exclusion of the English opium trade from the Celestial Empire.  The annexation of the Transvaal resulted from the expansion of English capitalists to the Rand mines, much as the advance of the United States flag to the Hawaiian Islands followed American sugar planters thither.  American capital in the Caribbean states of South America has repeatedly tried to embroil those countries with the United States government; and its increasing presence in Cuba is undoubtedly ominous for the independence of the island, because with capital go men and influence.

When the foreign investor is not a corporation but a government, the expanding commercial influence looks still more surely to tangible political results; because such national enterprises have at bottom a political motive, however much overlaid by an economic exterior.  When the British government secured a working majority of the Suez Canal stock, it sealed the fate of Egypt to become ultimately a province of the British Empire.  Russian railroads in Manchuria were the well-selected tool for the Russification and final annexation of the province.  The weight of American national enterprise in the Panama Canal Zone sufficed to split off from the Colombian federation a peripheral state, whose detachment is obviously a preliminary for eventual incorporation into United States domain.  The efforts of the German government to secure from the Sultan of Turkey railroad concessions through Asia Minor for German capitalists has aroused jealousy in financial and political circles in St. Petersburg, and prompted a demand from the Russian Foreign Office upon Turkey for the privilege of constructing railroads through eastern Asia Minor.[313]