“Writing in 1914 on the verge of the war which he tried to believe was not coming, H.N. Brailsford in ‘The War of Steel and Gold’ paid tribute to both Hobson and Angell; he dissented from the latter on the colonial issue, agreeing rather with Angell’s Marxist critic Kautsky (17). He was acutely aware of the international anarchy that socialists were complaining of. “Europe is in perpetual flux, and peace is preserved only by a constant readjustment of the strains and tensions which hold it together” (18). He had no doubt that economic appetites were at the bottom of the malady; and like Hobson he held that imperialism benefited only a minority though he extended this from sectional interests to the plutocracy as a whole. “Regarded as a national undertaking Imperialism does not pay. Regarded as a means of assuring unearned income to the governing class, it emphatically does pay” (19). Like Hobson too he singled out excessive investment of capital overseas as the root of the mischief, and proposed the same cure. “Raise wages, raise with them the standard of comfort, and this restless capital need no longer wander abroad” (20). Marx and Engels were deeply interested in some aspects of imperialism, mainly in Ireland and in India. It cannot be said that they arrived at anything like a systematic view of imperialism, or that such a view can be derived in any straightforward way from Marx’s dissection of capitalism. In their later years they felt with regret that capitalism was gaining a new lease of life by spreading outward over the world. But Marx died in 1883 when the scramble for colonies was only reaching its climax, and Engels in 1895 before its consequences were fully unfolded; and many of their ideas were left buried in heaps of old articles and letters. They may be said to have left a loophole for an indulgent attitude to colonialism, because in their eyes, although colonial rule was bad the old feudal stagnation it broke into was worse still. A rude, painful jerking awake of the other continents by European technology might indeed be called their version of the ‘civilising mission’ that Europe credited itself with” [V.G. Kiernan, ‘Marxism and Imperialism’, London, 1974] [(17) H.N. Brailsford, ‘The War of Steel and Gold’, London, 1914, p. 164; (18) Ibid., p. 22; (19) Ibid., p.78; (20) H.N. Brailsford, op. cit., p. 81]