is but slowly created, and must not be arbitrarily defined in terms of race or language; and that the capacity for self-government is only formed by a long process of training, and has never existed except among peoples who were unified by a strongly felt community of sentiment, and had acquired the habit and instinct of loyalty to the law.  Assuredly it is the duty of Europe and America to extend these fruitful conceptions to the regions which have passed under their influence.  But the process must be a very slow one, and it can only be achieved under tutelage.  It is the control of the European peoples over the non-European world which has turned the world into an economic unit, brought it within a single political system, and opened to us the possibility of making a world-order such as the most daring dreamers of the past could never have conceived.  This control cannot be suddenly withdrawn.  For a very long time to come the world-states whose rise we have traced must continue to be the means by which the political discoveries of Europe, as well as her material civilisation, are made available for the rest of the world.  The world-states are such recent things that we have not yet found a place for them in our political philosophy.  But unless we find a place for them, and think in terms of them, in the future, we shall be in danger of a terrible shipwreck.

If, then, it is essential, not only for the economic development of the world, but for the political advancement of its more backward peoples, that the political suzerainty of the European peoples should survive, and as a consequence that the world should continue to be dominated by a group of great world-states, how are we to conjure away the nightmare of inter-imperial rivalry which has brought upon us the present catastrophe, and seems to threaten us with yet more appalling ruin in the future?  Only by resolving and ensuring, as at the great settlement we may be able to do, that the necessary political control of Europe over the outer world shall in future be exercised not merely in the interests of the mistress-states, but in accordance with principles which are just in themselves, and which will give to all peoples a fair chance of making the best use of their powers.  But how are we to discover these principles, if the ideas of nationality and self-government, to which we pin our faith in Europe, are to be held inapplicable to the greater part of the non-European world?  There is only one possible source of instruction:  our past experience, which has now extended over four centuries, and which we have in this book endeavoured to survey.