Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/363

Rh come into being gradually and by accident rather than by design; it has grown slowly and healthfully through the centuries as an oak grows, and its strength and its justification are in that. Our sons took their lives in their hands and went exploring on their own account into savage regions and settled down and colonised the waste places of the earth; our merchant adventurers sailed into unknown parts to do business among strange races and establish markets where none had been before. They had little enough encouragement and often the most crass discouragement from their own government, which was so far from dreaming of conquest that not infrequently it extended its protection to its wandering children with reluctance, and formally took over the control of this or that uncivilised land not to colonise it, but because its subjects had colonised it already. Germany's wise professors even sneered at our inefficiency as empire-builders, because we had gone about it so unscientifically and did not really govern our colonies; we had not efficiently