th and central Africa. But regions
of administered barbarism occur not only in Africa. The point is that
they are administered, and that their economic development is very
largely in the hands, and will for many generations remain in the hands,
of the possessing country. Hitherto their administration has been in
the interests of the possessing nation alone. Their acquisition has been
a matter of bitter rivalries, their continued administration upon
exclusive lines is bound to lead to dangerous clashings. The common
sense of the situation points to a policy of give and take, in which
throughout the possessions of all the Pledged Allies, the citizens of
all will have more or less equal civil advantages. And this means some
consolidation of the general control of those Administered Territories.
I have already hinted at the possibility that the now exclusively
British navy may some day be a world-navy controlled by an Admiralty
representing a group of allies, Australasia, Canada, Britain and, it may
be, France and Russia and the United States. To those who know how
detached the British Admiralty is at the present time from the general
methods of British political life, there will be nothing strange in this
idea of its completer detachment. Its personnel does to a large extent
constitute a class apart. It takes its boys out of the general life very
often before they have got to their fourteenth birthday. It is not so
closely linked up with specific British social elements, with political
parties and the general educational system, as are the rest of the
national services.

There is nothing so very fantastic in this idea of a sort of
World-Admiralty; it is not even completely novel. Such bodies as the
Knights Templars transcended nationality in the Middle Ages. I do not
see how some such synthetic control of the seas is to be avoided in the
future. And now coming back to the "White Man's Burthen," is there not a
possibility that such a board of marine and international control as the
naval and international problems of the future may produce (or some
closely parallel body with a stronger Latin element), would also be
capable of dealing with these barbaric "Administered Territories"? A day
may come when Tripoli, Nigeria, the French and the Belgian Congo will be
all under one supreme control. We may be laying the foundations of such
a system to-day unawares. The unstable and fluctuating conferences of
the Allies to-day, their r