And yet this stultification is what the politicians of all countries are engaged in promoting, or at best are not actively discouraging, to this very hour. Now it is the same with a Political Economy which would encourage the struggles, the uncertainties, the closings down of mills and workshops, etc., which a universal Free Trade, with its open markets, would involve at the present stage of the world, when separate political nationalities are all engaged on the supreme object of jealously guarding their independence when acquired, and of acquiring it when it has not yet been attained. It is true, of course, that in the eminent successful instances of world conquest by single Imperial powers, - as of the Eastern nations by the Greeks, of the West by the Romans, of the Indies by the English, and even in the over-running of the greater part of Europe by the emissaries of the French Revolution under the early Napoleonic regime, - a fertilizing deposit of the higher political, social, and humanitarian virtues which civilization exists to realise, was in each instance left behind, - a deposit which was not altogether lost even in the East until the Mahommedan conquests, and which was not lost at all but on the contrary was absorbed and appropriated by the Barbarian invaders of the West, while even the fertilizing rains of the French Revolution, remain as permanent possessions for modern Europe in spite of all the reactions since Napoleonic times; - and as for the English conquest of India, it has been so far productive of nothing but benefit, and with a minimum of disturbance or drawback, if any, for the Indian people.

In saying all this I shall perhaps be felt to be injuring my cause - namely, my attempt to assimilate the laws of Political Economy with the course of Civilization - by making the success of these invasions of the separate nationalities of the world by the greater Imperial potentates, not only a standing contradiction to my advocacy of a national as distinct from a general or cosmopolitical standpoint, but a direct incentive to the very Free Trade which I am condemning. And yet if we stop to consider what it was that these successful world-empires and imperial dominations really accomplished, we shall find that they gave the subject nations which owned their sway complementary rather than competitive ideas, - if I may venture to use in speaking of Politics, for the purpose of marking a real distinction, the same terminology which I have used in Political Economy. And as we found that in economics, competitive products annihilate each other and are a deduction and loss, whereas complementary products are an addition and gain: so in the Graeco-Roman and other imperial civilizations, the only elements which proved fertilizing, progressive, and permanent additions to the existing stock of civilization were those which were complementary and could be assimilated by affinity, not those which were competitive and which could only have gained a foothold by entirely breaking up the existing organization of the different peoples.

The Graeco-Roman civilization brought to the conquered nationalities, order, even-handed justice, and peace, a greater range of abstract knowledge, and a higher scientific jurisprudence, all of which being complementary and easily assimilated, could and did bear fruit at once. It was the same with the higher elements of civilization which the English carried with them to India, and with the secular science which the Japanese have accepted from the Western nations. A new religion, on the other hand, is a competitive idea, and will be instinctively resisted by force by every nation in proportion to the strength of its purely national sentiment; for if once invited to enter in freely, it will as surely, though silently and unseen, eat out a nation's distinctive civilization - root, trunk, branches, stems, and leaves - as a colony of white ants will a decaying tree; - as Christianity did that of the Pagan Graeco-Roman world, Mahommedanism the Eastern Christian world, and as the religion of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality of Rousseau which the French Revolution carried throughout Europe, is doing for the Christianized Feudalism of the Middle Age Barbarian nationalities erected on the ruins of the Roman Empire.

If, therefore, the nations of Europe and the West, and of Asia and the East, wish to retain intact the essential elements of their nationality and civilization, let them beware of permitting the free entrance and propaganda of each others' religions, and especially of the dogmatic theological systems in which these religions are embodied; for although the essential spirit of the highest religion is a complementary product, and can be assimilated anywhere and everywhere with nothing but benefit to general civilization, the theological formulas which are bound up with it are antagonistic and competitive in their essential nature, and are as poisonous to the life of other nations which embrace them, as is the mixing the different peoples themselves on the same areas of political soil.

Now, it is precisely the same with that side of civilization which deals with the purely economic policy of nations, except that it works its effects through material instruments of production and material wealth, and not through the earlier forms of brute force and conquest, or the more insidious mental and spiritual forces of philosophies and religions. And therefore, if a nation which desires above all things to preserve its distinctive nationality in freedom, dignity, independence, power, and influence among the other nations, is at the same time prepared to risk all on a single hazard, no shorter cut can be found to it than to stand boldly forth and proclaim to the world its intention to open its ports freely to the products of all nations, inviting them to do the same. If they accept, and the nation in question is supreme in some one or more great departments of world-industry, it will win, and if all its powers are already concentrated and organized for the attack, will overrun the other nations and extinguish their competing industries like a conquering host; if, on the other hand, it is supreme in nothing, but mediocre in all, its circle of rivals will bombard it, each from its particular vantage ground of supremacy in this or that department of industry, and reduce its mills, factories, vineyards, and soil, to extinction and desolation, precisely as in war.