great rush for extra-European possessions.  The advocate of the Doctrine of Power is not, and cannot be, satisfied with equality of opportunity; he demands supremacy, he demands monopoly, he demands the means to injure and destroy his rivals.  It would not be just to say that this doctrine was influential only in Germany; it was in some degree potent everywhere, especially in this period, which was the period par excellence of ‘imperialism’ in the bad sense of the term.  But it is certainly true that no state has ever been so completely dominated by it as Germany; and no state less than Britain.  It was in the light of this doctrine that the demands of the new scientific industry were interpreted.  Hag-ridden by this conception, when the statesmen of Europe awoke to the importance of the non-European world, it was not primarily the economic needs of their countries that they thought of, for these were, on the whole, not inadequately met:  what struck their imagination was that, in paying no attention to the outer world, they had missed great opportunities of increasing their power.  This oversight, they resolved, must be rectified before it was too late.

For when the peoples of Western and Central Europe, no longer engrossed by the problems of Nationalism and Liberalism, cast their eyes over the world, lo! the scale of things seemed to have changed.  Just as, in the fifteenth century, civilisation had suddenly passed from the stage of the city-state or the feudal principality to the stage of the great nation-state, so now, while the European peoples were still struggling to realise their nationhood, civilisation seemed to have stolen a march upon them, and to have advanced once more, this time into the stage of the world-state.  For to the east of the European nations lay the vast Russian Empire, stretching from Central Europe across Asia to the Pacific; and in the west the American Republic extended from ocean to ocean, across three thousand miles of territory; and between these and around them spread the British Empire, sprawling over the whole face of the globe, on every sea and in every continent.  In contrast with these giant empires, the nation-states of Europe felt themselves out of scale, just as the Italian cities in the sixteenth century must have felt themselves out of scale in comparison with the new nation-states of Spain and France.  To achieve the standard of the world-state, to make their own nations the controlling factors in wide dominions which should include territories and populations of varied types, became the ambition of the most powerful European states.  A new political ideal had captivated the mind of Europe.