for the spread of "luxury, feminism, theorism, [and] the decay of martial inclination and military capacity."

The fear of decadence haunted all the "over-civilized" industrial nations at this time, especially the patrician classes, who embraced imperialism not so much as a higher stage of capitalism but as the cure for capitalism—for the "purposeless gluttony," as Lea put it, that sapped the fighting spirit. In order to win businessmen to the cause of expansion, imperialists had to argue, somewhat inconsistently, that colonies would enhance national wealth; but they were happier when they could urge war and conquest for their own sake. Rudyard Kipling glorified the imperial "game for its own sake." Like Holmes, he traced the purity of the soldier's faith to its absolute indifference to instrumental considerations. "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." In the imaginative writing prompted by the British rule in India, according to Allen J. Greenberger, "the value of empire-building seems to have less to do with the Empire itself than with the development of certain qualities in the empire-builders." Colonization would revitalize the home country, overcoming the "almost oriental luxury," in the words of a minor novelist, that had "gone far to weaken the fibre" of the British middle class. Henry Stanley, the explorer of darkest Africa, drew the usual lesson in his autobiography : "England is losing her great characteristics, she is becoming too effeminate and soft from long inactivity, long enfeeblement of purpose, brought about by indolence and ease, distrust of her own powers and shaken nerves."

The explorer, conqueror, or colonial administrator, as conceived by novelists and propagandists in France and Germany as well as in England and the United States, was a figure larger than life, often modeled on Cecil Rhodes—a titan, a colossus, a man of pure energy and will. Careless of consequences, indifferent to his own safety, more than a little scornful of his compatriots at home, he inspired awe in the natives, unconditional loyalty among his subordinates. Having exchanged the closed little world of Europe for the immense open spaces of India and Africa, he enjoyed an original relation to the universe. Africa, in particular, appealed to European imperialists at the turn of the century for the same reason that images of the Wild West appealed to Americans. "A man's a man here," says the hero of one of the many English novels celebrating the Boer War. "He means something. He can stretch himself.... The

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