Page:The league of nations and primitive peoples (IA leagueofnationsp00oliviala).pdf/8

 weaker peoples that were then keeping diplomatists busy. That dictum is as true to-day as ever, in the very significant sense that, whilst the Powers partitioned primitive Africa and the Pacific without coming to blows in the process, the crash of the world- war has come because, when they had safely disposed of all the 'primitive' peoples available, and, after a few tentative demonstrations in South America, had been chased away from that neighbourhood by the watchdogs of the Monroe Doctrine, they proceeded (in rivalry now with Russia and Austria also) to apply to half-civilized and more-than-half-civilized Africa—to Morocco and Tripoli, to weak or backward States in Europe—Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Turkey—to Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Persia—very similar processes of encroachment, intervention, and control, on the same justificatory principles as they had appealed to in partitioning Africa, and as are now being applied, on the plea of much the same arguments, by the Central Empires to Poland, Rumania, and the dismembered racial groups that recently made up the Russian realm. Meanwhile, the United States had entered upon a similar policy among the surviving possessions of Spain in the Antilles and the Philippines, with further interventions in San Domingo and Haiti.

The world-war came, it may fairly be said, because the general politics of Europe had taken on the character and the colour of the politics of the 'scramble for Africa'—because all Foreign Politics had become 'African' Politics.