regard the Jews. It is the Christian
populations of the Balkans who were the traders and workers--those
brought most under economic influences; it was the Turks who escaped
those influences. A few years since, I wrote: "If the conqueror profits
much by his conquest, as the Romans in one sense did, it is the
conqueror who is threatened by the enervating effect of the soft and
luxurious life; while it is the conquered who are forced to labour for
the conqueror, and who learn in consequence those qualities of steady
industry which are certainly a better moral training than living upon
the fruits of others, upon labour extorted at the sword's point. It is
the conqueror who becomes effete, and it is the conquered who learn
discipline and the qualities making for a well-ordered State."

Could we ask a better illustration than the history of the Turk and his
Christian victims? I exemplified the matter thus: "If during long
periods a nation gives itself up to war, trade languishes, the
population loses the habit of steady industry, government and
administration become corrupt, abuses escape punishment, and the real
sources of a people's strength and expansion dwindle. What has caused
the relative failure and decline of Spanish, Portuguese, and French
expansion in Asia and the New World, and the relative success of English
expansion therein? Was it the mere hazards of war which gave to Great
Britain the domination of India and half of the New World? That is
surely a superficial reading of history. It was, rather, that the
methods and processes of Spain, Portugal, and France were military,
while those of the Anglo-Saxon world were commercial and peaceful. Is it
not a commonplace that in India, quite as much as in the New World, the
trader and the settler drove out the soldier and the conqueror? The
difference between the two methods was that one was a process of
conquest, and the other of colonizing, or non-military administration
for commercial purposes. The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea,
which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty
military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other co-operation....

"How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that
ever existed--the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the
Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the
Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them we
may see the same process