As the cycle of nineteenth century imperialism, in which Joseph
Chamberlain played so striking a role, lost its ebullience and faltered
into a decline, the theorists took up where the practitioners had left
off. On the whole the entire imperialist forward surge fell outside
the expectations and prophecies of the principal schools of the day.
Not until the movement had already reached its peak did it receive
very serious theoretical attention. Looking backward it is possible to
discover exceedingly interesting philosophical and scientific trends
which can be seen as the forerunners in the realm of ideas of the
great events which were taking place in the realm of action, but they
were very scantily noticed at the time, if they were noticed at all.

In almost all respects the general currents of opinion in the first
half of the nineteenth century, which reach down strongly but far
less confidently into our own time, were not only hostile to the type
of expansion by force and fraud which characterized imperialist ac-
tivity, but were committed to a method of analysis which tended to
exclude the likelihood of its happening. In economic thought the two
dominant schools were the classical economists of the Manchester
variety and their brothers (for they shared much the same intellec-
tual heritage) of the Marxist persuasion. Both, in their different ways,
looked to a future in which there would be a brotherhood of man
arising from the new industrial system and the scientific discoveries
upon which it was based. Politically the major lines were the spread
of constitutionalism, democracy, and the self-determination of nations,
which likewise pointed in the direction of peace and goodwill among
men. Wars and revolutions for the attainment of these purposes
were conceivable and even justifiable, but they were wars which in
each instance, it seemed, worked to eradicate abuses and to eliminate
the necessity of further convulsions of the same order. On the greatest
scale this was the content and the source of the Wilsonian idealism
of the period of the first World War. But, on the other hand, wars
which looked to domination and oppression were the outmoded bar-
barisms of less advanced people, remote from the blessings of modern
industrial civilization.

-vii-