ABSTRACT
The period preceding the war has been called “The Age of Imperialism” on account of the last-hour scramble for the few unappropriated slices of hitherto independent backward countries and for the remainder of the once mighty, now crumbling, empires, Turkey and China. It did not initiate a new policy, nor herald a new age; it was terminating rather an era which had begun with the Crusades and had reached its natural time limit with the Declaration of Independence. Once mankind accepted the doctrine that “men were created equal,” the physical, as well as the moral, basis of Imperialism collapsed—the right of the stronger to rule the weaker.
