which we have won our Indian Empire has been done more recently by natives. In India, as in Egypt, great standing armies are placed under British commanders: almost all the fighting associated with our African dominions, except in the Southern part, has been done for us by natives."
In the following words Hobson draws a picture of the possible results following the partition of China:
"The greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appearance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or residential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a large body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of the production of the more perishable goods; all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and manufactures flowing in as tribute from Asia and Africa.
"We have foreshadowed the possibility of even a larger alliance of Western States, a European federation of great Powers, which, so far from forwarding the cause of world civilisation, might introduce the gigantic peril of a Western parasitism, a group of advanced industrial nations, whose upper classes drew vast tribute from Asia and Africa, with which they supported great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of a new financial aristo-
