traders who followed them, were not
idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of
western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive
conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better
elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they
were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of
treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives
accordingly.

England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated
the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as
instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a
form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the
ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has
worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with
America was an important source of English wealth, and the
philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it.
There is no European race which can afford to remember its
first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with
shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of
guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question
of real importance is how far these various states were able
to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher
realization of their duty towards their races whom they were
called by the claims of their own superior civilization to
protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the
issue.[56]

The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their
duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed
one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind
with which we are concerned.

How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can
help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The
white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because
they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a
long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over
their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they
owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that
knowledge--virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance,
unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are
the inheritors cou