sion of its own
power, and that before this duty every other consideration must give
way. The Doctrine of Power has never received a more unflinching
expression than it received from the German Treitschke, whose influence
was at its height during the years of the 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 fe