Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it often did--at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag, when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions. Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes, the anti-Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of the annexed country was “the white man’s burden”, and posed as weary Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last drop of their blood for “the integrity of the Empire”; and they did in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity. In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us. India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how loth our Capitalism was to let them go.