sion of capitalistic ideals
by means of little school-houses in the Philippines, by means of the
strict and rather harsh justice in British colonies, by means of the
unconscious teachings of Christian missionaries, by means of the swift
decay of ancient, tenacious faiths. It is a process linking the ends
of the world, uniting the statesmen and financiers of the imperialistic
nation with wretches in the swarming cities of the East, with
half-drunken men seeking for rubber in tangled forests, with negroes
searching over great expanses of country for the ivory tusks of
elephants, with the Kaffirs in the diamond mines who enter naked and
depart naked, and whose bodies are examined each day to discover the
diamonds which might be buried in the flesh. At one end of the line
are the urbane diplomats seated about a table at some Algeciras, at the
other, in the very depths of distant colonies, there is slavery,
flagellation, political and intellectual corruption, missionary
propaganda, and the day to day business and planning of white settlers,
who are anxious to make their fortune quick and get back to "God's own
country." It is a process so vast, so compelling, so interwoven with
the deepest facts of our modern life that our ordinary moral judgments
seem pale and unreal in contact with it. And so too with religion.
Christianity which changed in its passage from Judea to Rome and from
Rome to the Northern Barbarians takes on again a new aspect when
imperialistic nations encounter the peoples they are to utilise. This
imperialistic Christianity defends forced labour and slavery as an
advance over a mere doing nothing. The parable of the ten {98} talents
is the one Christian doctrine in which the imperialist fervently
believes.

This modern imperialism, which compels subject peoples to work at
extractive industries at the behest of the swarming millions of the
industrial nations, which excites, stimulates, urges, pushes, forces
coloured peoples to raise bananas and cotton and buy shirts, gew-gaws,
and whiskey, is at bottom a movement compelled by the economic
expansion and necessity of the older countries. It is an outlet for
the pressure, strain and expansiveness of the growing industrial
nations, an outlet for industrialism itself. It ranges the industrial
nations as a whole against the backward agricultural countries, and
binds them together into a forced union, in which the industrial
nations guide and rule and the b