Valley was due quite as much to the zeal of the heroic
missionaries of the Jesuit and other orders as to the enterprise
of trappers and traders. In English colonisation, indeed, the
missionary motive was never, until the nineteenth century, so
strongly marked. But its place was taken by a parallel political
motive. The belief that they were diffusing the free institutions
in which they took so much pride certainly formed an element in
the colonial activities of the English. It is both foolish and
unscientific to disregard this element of propaganda in the
imperialist movement, still more to treat the assertion of it by
the colonising powers as mere hypocrisy. The motives of imperial
expansion, as of other human activities, are mixed, and the
loftier elements in them are not often predominant. But the
loftier elements are always present. It is hypocrisy to pretend
that they are alone or even chiefly operative. But it is cynicism
wholly to deny their influence. And of the two sins cynicism is
the worse, because by over-emphasising it strengthens and
cultivates the lower among the mixed motives by which men are
ruled.

The fourth of the governing motives of imperial expansion is the
need of finding new homes for the surplus population of the
colonising people. This was not in any country a very powerful
motive until the nineteenth century, for over-population did not
exist in any serious degree in any of the European states until
that age. Many of the political writers in seventeenth-century
England, indeed, regarded the whole movement of colonisation with
alarm, because it seemed to be drawing off men who could not be
spared. But if the population was nowhere excessive, there were in
all countries certain classes for which emigration to new lands