ude
the usual jockeying for advantage--escaped some of the worst of the abuses
afflicting other lands, but watched impotently as their desperately needed
resources were drained away. The coming agony of Latin America was all too
clearly prefigured in the suffering of Mexico, large sections of which had
been annexed by its great northern neighbour, and whose natural resources
were already attracting the attention of avaricious foreign corporations.
Particularly embarrassing from a Western point of view--because of its
proximity to such brilliant European capitals as Berlin and Vienna--was the
medieval oppression in which the hundred million nominally liberated serfs
in Russia led lives of sullen, hopeless misery. Most tragic of all was the
plight of the inhabitants of the African continent, divided against one
another by artificial boundaries created through cynical bargains among
European powers. It has been estimated that during the first decade of the
twentieth century over a million people in the Congo perished--starved,
beaten, worked literally to death for the profit of their distant masters,
a preview of the fate that was to engulf well over one hundred million of
their fellow human beings across Europe and Asia before the century
reached its end.(4)

These masses of humankind, despoiled and scorned--but representing most of
the earth's inhabitants--were seen not as protagonists but essentially as
objects of the new century's much vaunted civilizing process. Despite
benefits conferred on a minority among them, the colonial peoples existed
chiefly to be acted upon--to be used, trained, exploited, Christianized,
civilized, mobilized--as the shifting agendas of Western powers dictated.
These agendas may have been harsh or mild in execution, enlightened or
selfish, evangelical or exploitative, but were shaped by materialistic
forces that determined both their means and most of their ends. To a large
extent, religious and political pieties of various kinds masked both ends
and means from the publics in Western lands, who were thus able to derive
moral satisfaction from the blessings their nations were assumed to be
conferring on less worthy peoples, while themselves enjoying the material
fruits of this benevolence.

To point out the failings of a great civilization is not to deny its
accomplishments. As the twentieth century opened, the peoples of the West
could take justifiable pride in the technological, scientific a