What does concern us in our present discussion is the effect of European political control upon the general process of Westernization in Eastern lands. And there can be no doubt that such Westernization was thereby greatly furthered. Once in control of an Oriental country, the European rulers were bound to favour its Westernization for a variety of reasons. Mere self-interest impelled them to make the country peaceful and prosperous, in order to extract profit for themselves and reconcile the inhabitants to their rule. This meant the replacement of inefficient and sanguinary native despotisms inhibiting progress and engendering anarchy by stable colonial governments, maintaining order, encouraging industry, and introducing improvements like the railway, the post, sanitation, and much more besides. In addition to these material innovations, practically all the Western governments endeavoured to better the social, intellectual, and spiritual condition of the peoples that had come under their control. The European Powers who built up colonial empires during the nineteenth century were actuated by a spirit far more enlightened than that of former times, when the early colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Holland, and the English East India Company had been run on the brutal and short-sighted doctrine of sheer exploitation. In the nineteenth century all Western rule in the Orient was more or less impregnated with the ideal of "The White Man's Burden." The great empire-builders of the nineteenth century, actuated as they were not merely by self-interest and patriotic ambition but also by a profound sense of obligation to improve the populations which they had brought under their country's sway, felt themselves bearers of Western enlightenment and laboured to diffuse all the benefits of Western civilization. They honestly believed that the extension of Western political control was the best and quickest, perhaps the only, means of modernizing the backward portions of the world.