From them also have arisen all the colonial empires of the European states.  It is no mere coincidence that all the great colonising powers have been unified nation-states, and that their imperial activities have been most vigorous when the national sentiment was at its strongest among them.  Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia:  these are the great imperial powers, and they are also the great nation-states.  Denmark and Sweden have played a more modest part, in extra-European as in European affairs.  Germany and Italy only began to conceive imperial ambitions after their tardy unification in the nineteenth century.  Austria, which has never been a nation-state, never became a colonising power.  Nationalism, then, with its eagerness for dominion, may be regarded as the chief source of imperialism; and if its effects are unhappy when it tries to express itself at the expense of peoples in whom the potentiality of nationhood exists, they are not necessarily unhappy in other cases.  When it takes the form of the settlement of unpeopled lands, or the organisation and development of primitive barbaric peoples, or the reinvigoration and strengthening of old and decadent societies, it may prove itself a beneficent force.  But it is beneficent only in so far as it leads to an enlargement of law and liberty.

The second of the blended motives of imperial expansion has been the desire for commercial profits; and this motive has played so prominent a part, especially in our own time, that we are apt to exaggerate its force, and to think of it as the sole motive.  No doubt it has always been present in some degree in all imperial adventures.  But until the nineteenth century it probably formed the predominant motive only in regard to the acquisition of tropical lands.  So long as Europe continued to be able to produce as much as she needed of the food and the raw materials for industry that her soil and climate were capable of yielding, the commercial motive for acquiring territories in the temperate zone, which could produce only commodities of the same type, was comparatively weak; and the European settlements in these areas, which we have come to regard as the most important products of the imperialist movement, must in their origin and early settlement be mainly attributed to other than commercial motives.  But Europe has always depended for most of her luxuries upon the tropics:  gold and ivory and gems, spices and sugar and fine woven stuffs, from a very early age found their way into Europe from India and the East, coming by slow and devious caravan routes to the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.  Until the end of the fifteenth century the European trader had no direct contact with the sources of these precious commodities; the supply of them was scanty and the price high.  The desire to gain a more direct access to the sources of this traffic, and to obtain control of the supply, formed the principal motive for the great explorations.  But these,