East thereto.

In my opinion, the chief fallacy involved in criticisms of Western
control over Eastern lands arises from failure to discriminate between
nineteenth-century and twentieth-century imperialism. Nineteenth-century
imperialism was certainly inevitable, and was apparently beneficial in
the main. Twentieth-century imperialism cannot be so favourably judged.
By the year 1900 the Oriental peoples were no longer mere fanatical
obscurantists neither knowing nor caring to know anything outside the
closed circle of their ossified, decadent civilizations. The East had
been going to school, and wanted to begin to apply what it had been
taught by the West. It should have been obvious that these peoples,
whose past history proved them capable of achievement and who were now
showing an apparently genuine desire for new progress, needed to be
treated differently from what they had been. In other words, a more
liberal attitude on the part of the West had become advisable.

But no such change was made. On the contrary, in the West itself, the
liberal idealism which had prevailed during most of the nineteenth
century was giving way to that spirit of fierce political and economic
rivalry which culminated in the Great War.[85] Never had Europe been so
avid for colonies, for "spheres of influence," for concessions and
preferential markets; in fine, so "imperialistic," in the unfavourable
sense of the term. The result was that with the beginning of the
twentieth century Western pressure on the East, instead of being
relaxed, was redoubled; and the awakening Orient, far from being met
with sympathetic consideration, was treated more ruthlessly than it had
been for two hundred years. The way in which Eastern countries like
Turkey and Persia, striving to reform themselves and protect their
independence, were treated by Europe's new _Realpolitik_ would have
scandalized the liberal imperialists of a generation before. It
certainly scandalized present-day liberals, as witness these scathing
lines written in 1912 by the well-known British publicist Sidney Low:

"The conduct of the Most Christian Powers during the past few years has
borne a striking resemblance to that of robber-bands descending upon an
unarmed and helpless population of peasants. So far from respecting the
rights of other nations, they have exhibited the most complete and
cynical disregard for them. They have, in fact, asserted the claim of
the strong to prey upon the