ENDS AND MEANS
have become particularly insistent and menacing. The
Haves have consequently found it necessary to re-arm,
among other reasons, in order to defend their colonies*
In the days when sea-power was all important, the defence
of a 'far-flung empire' was relatively easy. To-day it is,
to say the least of it, exceedingly difficult. It has been
repeatedly suggested that the imperial powers should re-
nounce their claim to exclusive ownership of colonies and,
using the machinery of the Mandate System, place their
colonial territories under international control. By doing
this they would alky the envy and resentment of the
Have-not countries, appreciably lessen the probability of
war, and solve the, at present, almost insoluble problem of
imperial defence. This suggestion has not been acted upon
by any colony-owning country. On the contrary, it has
been indignantly rejected. All the governments concerned,
from that of Great Britain to that of Portugal, have ex-
pressed the determination to shed the last drop of their
subjects' blood before yielding a foot of colonial territory.
The British government has done more than refuse to
transfer its colonies to the League of Nations: it has
chosen the moment when it no longer possesses command
of the seas and when, even if it did possess it, such command
would be of little use, to reverse the free-trade policy by
means of which its predecessors (though at the head of a
country incomparably stronger and less ^vulnerable than
contemporary Britain) thought fit to placate the envy of
other powers. It has closed the doors of its colonies to
the trade of other nations, thus forcibly reminding them of
their own poverty and giving them new grievances against
the British Empire. It is one of the absurd paradoxes of
the present situation that those Englishmen who are most
anxious to establish friendly relations with the dictatorships,
especially Germany and Italy, are precisely those who are
loudest in their denunciations of the only scheme by means
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