THE CONSERVATIVE MAN
399
capitalist aristocracy. In these countries a few large towns became
centers of luxurious living for a small aristocracy living at the
expense of the peasants and maintaining the "law and order" which
enabled foreign capital to exploit the nation. Only a small part of
the population was absorbed in industrial enterprises, and the coun–
try
suffered from a high degree of over-population. In more back–
ward countries like Africa, the natives had found their old t:r;ibal
existence destroyed without being prepared for life under a com–
petitive economy. Or they had to offer themselves as cheap laborers
utilized for the exploitation of national resources. The lion's share
of commercial profits flowed into the leading Western countries
which were the big creditor nations of the world. The backward
countries were in an inferior position, and so dependent on world
economy that an independent class of native capitalists could not
emerge. In some agrarian countries, conditions may have im–
proved but were not good enough to create prosperity for the mid–
dle
clas~es
and the rise of the Western type of Conservative Man.
The expansion of Western civilization destroyed backward
societies in other countries without extending the relative pros–
perity Western Europe enjoyed before the Great War (1914) to
the rest of the world. New technical means, railways, electricity,
came into use in countries which were backward in order to facili–
tate the exploitation of raw material resources, but introduction
of electricity does not in itself prove that a people are better off.
Man cannot live on the possibility of buying a railway ticket or
lighting his room with electricity. Social conditions in these coun–
tries did not develop in the same way as in the mother country. In
England the misery which early capitalism created among those
who
had lost their own homesteads when the new industrial enter–
prises could engage only a part of the available labor power might
be
regarded as a temporary phenomenon or a childhood disease of
capitalism. But in colonial or "backward" countries, the childhood
disease became chronic. The profits which Western European capi–
talists derived from colonial enterprises and world trade reduced
the consumptive power of the colonial countries and made the
growth of independent national industries impossible. There was
no chance for a gradual rise of small-scale enterprises and still less
possibility for the emergence of conservative man who could play
an important role in society.
