IV

SIR WALTER RALEGH

'O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword,
The expectancy and rose of the fair state

The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!'
SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet, Act II., Sc. i., 159-162.

[BIBLIOGRAPHY.-By far the best biography of Ralegh is Sir
Walter Ralegh; a biography by Mr. William Stebbing, Oxford
1891. His letters may be studied in the second of the two
volumes of the 'Life,' by Edward Edwards, 1868. The chief
collection of his works in prose and verse was published at
Oxford in eight volumes in 1829. The best edition of his
poetry is 'The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh and other courtly
poets, collected and authenticated, by John Hannah, D.C.L.
(Aldine Edition), London, 1885.' The most characteristic of
his shorter prose writings, his Discovery of Guiana, is pub-
lished in Cassells' National Library (No. 67).]

Primary cause of colonial expansion.

I

THE primary cause of colonial expansion lies in the natural ambition of the healthy human intellect to extend its range of vision and knowledge. Curiosity, the inquisitive desire to come to close quarters with what is out of sight, primarily accounts for the passion for travel and for exploration whence colonial movements spring. Intellectual activity is the primary cause of the colonising instinct.

Three

But the colonising, the exploring spirit, when once it has come into being, is invariably stimulated and kept secondary alive by at least three secondary causes, which are sometimes mistaken for the primary. In them good and bad are much tangled. The web of our life,'

causes.

116

says Shakespeare, 'is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.' Of a very mingled yarn is the web of which colonial effort is woven.

The intellectual desire to know more about the world than is possible to one who is content to pass his life in his native district or land is commonly stimulated, in the Greed of first place, by the hope of improving one's mate- gain. rial condition, by the expectation of making more money than were likely otherwise. Evil lurks in this expectation; it easily degenerates into greed of gain, into the passion for gold.

The desire for foreign exploration, too, is invigorated by impatience of that restraint which law or custom imposes on an old country, by the hope of greater liberty Passion for and personal independence. This hope may tempt liberty. to moral ruin; it may issue in the practice of licentious lawlessness.

Love of

Then there emerges a third motive-the love of mastery, the love of exercising authority over peoples of inferior civilisation or physical development. The love of mastery is capable alike of benefiting and of injuring humanity. If it be exercised prudently, it may serve to bring races, which would otherwise be excluded, within the pale of a higher civilisation; but if it be exercised imprudently, it sinks to tyranny and cruelty.

mastery.

The passion for mastery, the passion for gold, and the passion for freedom, have all stimulated colonising energy with mingled results. When the three passions are restrained by the moral sense, colonising energy works for the world's advantage; the good preponderates. Wherever the moral sense proves too weak to control the three perilous passions, colonising energy connotes much moral and physical evil.

Great colonising epochs.

II

Great colonising effort, which has its primary source in intellectual curiosity, is an invariable characteristic of eras like the era of the Renaissance, when man's intellect is working, whether for good or ill, with exceptional energy. The Greeks and Romans were great colonisers at the most enlightened epochs of their history. In modern Europe voyages of discovery were made by sailors of the Italian Republics, of the Spanish peninsula, and of France, when the spirit of the Renaissance was winging amongst them its highest flight.

At first the maritime explorers of Southern Europe confined their efforts to the coast of Africa, especially to the Then they passed to the East-to India, at first by way of the Red Sea, and afterwards round the Cape of Good Hope, and through

The Western

Hemi

sphere.

west coast.

the Indian Ocean. Nothing yet was known of the Western Hemisphere. It was a sanguine hope of reaching India by a new and direct route through western seas that led to the great discovery of the Continent of America.

Columbus, its discoverer, was a native of the Italian Republic of Genoa, a city distinguished by the feverish energy with which its inhabitants welcomed new ideas that were likely to increase men's material prosperity. It was in August 1492-when sailing under the patronage of the greatest sovereigns that filled the throne of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, on what he believed would prove a new route to the Indies-that Columbus struck land in what he called, and in what we still call, the West Indies. He made two voyages to the West

Columbus's discovery, 1492.