The same is true to an even more complete extent of the Imperialism of other continental countries. The new Imperialism nowhere extended the political and civil liberties of the mother country to any part of the vast territories which, after 1870, fell under the government of Western civilized Powers. Politically, the new Imperialism was an expansion of autocracy.
Taking the growth of Imperialism as illustrated in the expansion of Great Britain and of the chief continental Powers, we find the distinction between Imperialism and colonisation closely borne out by facts and figures, and warranting the following general judgments: —
First — Almost the whole of this imperial expansion was occupied with the political absorption of tropical or sub- tropical lands in which white men will not settle with their families.
Second — Nearly all the lands were thickly peopled by “lower races.”
Thus this recent imperial expansion stands entirely ,distinct from the colonization of sparsely peopled lands in temperate zones, where white colonists carry with them the modes of government, the industrial and other arts of the civilization of the mother country. The “occupation” of these new territories was comprised in the presence of a small minority of white men, officials, traders, and industrial organisers, exercising political and economic sway over great hordes of population regarded as inferior and as incapable of exercising any considerable rights of self-government, in politics or industry.
