up pretty well every avenue of dividend-earning; or, if we have not, the rate of remuneration has become so low that wider fields and better pastures must be sought elsewhere. At the same time the industrial and economic prosperity since the beginning of the present century has been such that "free" capital has accumulated in enormous quantities, and its investment at home must appear to its happy possessors a sheer waste. And so we get the yearning after financial markets in countries poorer in capital, but rich in economic possibilities. Those countries may be members of our own capitalist family—Russia, Italy, Rumania, self-governing dominions over the sea—or they may be strangers like China, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, or Abyssinia. Thither dividend-hunting capital flocks to fertilise the natural resources and, incidentally, to line the pockets of its holders. In some cases its activity is so guaranteed by historical or natural agencies that it becomes positively liberal, friendly, and pacifist. Such was the case with German capital in the three first-named countries, and such has been the case with British capital in the older Dominions. But there are cases in which capital, in its process of penetration, meets with considerable obstacles. The natives do not want any railways, or fear the consequences of having gold dug in their midst by foreign prospectors, or have a strange prejudice against their cemeteries being ravaged by bone-seeking phosphate manufacturers. Or, again, various national capitals come to graze in the same pastures; they want to build the same railways, to work the same mines, and to ravage the same cemeteries. Capital then becomes exceedingly angry. It gets red in the face, it discards all Liberalism and all civilisation (or Kultur, as the case may be), mails its fist and strikes right and left—at the natives, or at its rivals, or at both.
This is what we call the Imperialist stage of capitalist expansion. It is no longer a hunt for markets where one can dispose of manufactured goods, cotton or any other, but a hunt for countries where one can invest capital in some profitable business that would yield rich dividends. The difference is material not only in form. At the game of market-hunting for ready goods only those can play who have a large manufacturing industry at home. They alone can supply the needs of the markets, and they alone are able to underbid the stray rival. That was the position of this
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