The political predominance of the West over the East is, indeed, the outstanding factor in the whole question of Western influence upon the Orient. We have already surveyed Europe's conquest of the Near and Middle East during the past century, and we have seen how helpless the backward, decrepit Moslem world was in face of the twofold tide of political and economic subjugation. In fact, the economic phase was perhaps the more important factor in the rapidity and completeness of Europe's success. To be sure, some Eastern lands were subjugated at a stroke by naked military force, as in the French expedition to Algiers, the Russian conquest of central Asia, and the Italian descent upon Tripoli. Much oftener, however, subjection began by the essentially economic process known as "pacific penetration"--the acquirement of a financial grip upon a hitherto independent Oriental country by Western capital in the form of loans and concessions, until the assumption of Western political control became little more than a formal registration of what already existed in fact. Such is the story of the subjection of Egypt, Morocco, and Persia, while England's Indian Empire started in a purely trading venture--the East India Company. The tremendous potency of "pacific penetration" is often not fully appreciated. Take the significance of one item alone--railway concessions. Says that keen student of _Weltpolitik_, Doctor Dillon: "Railways are the iron tentacles of latter-day expanding Powers. They are stretched out caressingly at first. But once the iron has, so to say, entered the soul of the weaker nation, the tentacles swell to the dimensions of brawny arms, and the embrace tightens to a crushing grip."[82] On the question of the abstract rightness or wrongness of this subjection of the East by the West, I do not propose to enter. It has been exhaustively discussed, pro and con, and every reader of these pages is undoubtedly familiar with the stock arguments on both sides. The one thing certain is that this process of subjugation was, broadly speaking, inevitable. Given two worlds at such different levels as East and West at the beginning of the nineteenth century--the West overflowing with vitality and striding at the forefront of human progress, the East sunk in lethargy and decrepitude--and it was a foregone conclusion that the former would encroach upon the latter.