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