Naturally, as many of these reasons as possible were mustered to justify any given war or campaign.  But these were only the apparent reasons.  There are, for all wards, more basic causes than the immediate incidents or the avowed, always noble, reasons nations use as excuses to justify their use of force to impose their will on others.  Some of these basic causes were not peculiar to the nineteenth century, nor to the British.  Simple possession of power, and the ability to use it, always provides a powerful temptation to exercise it.  But there existed among the British people of the last century some peculiar attributes which indirectly led to conflict.
For a small island race, the British have always produced more than their share of able and talented men, but in the nineteenth century there was in many fields a super-abundance.  The list of eminent Victorians--and they were eminent--is staggering, particularly when it is remembered that the population of Great Britain in 1838 was only some nineteen million, less than half its present number and comparable to the present population of New York and New Jersey.  And these people concealed behind stiff manners and rigid morals a violent, restless energy which drove them away from the narrow confines of their islands to every part of the civilized world an energy which drove them away from the narrow confines of their islands to every party of the civilized world and deep into the vast areas of the unexplored, uncivilized world.  Carrying with them their own unbending attitudes, manners, customs and beliefs, they were continually getting into trouble by being in places where they need not have been; the goldfields of South Africa, and interior of China, Tibet and the West Coast of Africa.
Producing a superabundance of leaders, Britain built great armies from more populous but less efficient races and braced them with British officers. But there were more leaders still, and Britons commanded the armies of other peoples in China, Argentina, Portugal, Madagascar, Greece, Borneo, and Turkey.  Britons did not hesitate to exchange their bowlers for turbans, tarbushes or mandarin caps if only they were given men whom they could lead into battle.  Lawrence of Arabia was a wonder and a curiosity in this century, but there were hundreds of his countrymen like him who performed similar exploits in the previous century; Lawrence was simply one of the last of the breed.
The British people, from prime minister to yeoman, and British soldiers from general to private, were sustained in their international martial activities by an unquestioning and unquenchable conviction that British institutions and British customs, beliefs and doctrines were the best in the world--not only for  Britons,  but for all the other peoples of the earth as well.  And when  retain changed her mind,  Britons thought that everyone should; having for example, given up slavery herself in 1833, Britain energetically set about persuading others to do so, by force if necessary, and her warships prowled the Red Sea and off the Slave Coast, boarding other people's ships and freeing their slaves.

Wolseley in Burma (1853): What a supremely delightful moment it was!  No one in cold blood can imagine how intense is the pleasure of such a position who has not experienced it himself; there can be nothing else in the world like it, or that can approach its inspiration, its intense sense of pride.  You are for the first time being, and it is always short, lifted up from and out of all petty thoughts of self, and for the moment your whole existence, soul and body, seems to revel in a true sense of glory. . . . The blood seems to boil, the brain to be on fire.  Oh!  That I could again hope to experience such sensations!  I have won praise since then, and commanded at what in our little Army we call battles, and know what it is to gain the applause of soldiers; but in a long and varied military life, although as a captain I have led my own company in charging an enemy, I have never experienced the same unalloyed and elevating satisfaction, or known again the joy I then felt as I ran for the enemy's stockades at the head of a small mob of soldiers, most of them boys like myself.

FLASHMAN: Flashman, Harry Paget, Brigadier-General, VC, KCB, KCIE; Chevalier, Legion d'Honneur; US Medal of Honor; San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4^th Class. B. 1822, S. H. Flashman, Esq, Ashby, and Hon. Alicia Paget; Educ. Rug by School; m. Elspeth Rennie Morrison, d. Lord Paisley; one so., one d.  Served Afghanistan, 1841-42 (medals, thanks of Parliament); Crimea (staff); Indian Mutiny (Lucknow, etc, VC); china, Taiping Rebellion.  Served US Army (major, Union forces, 1862); colonel (staff) Army of the Confederacy, 1863.  Travelled extensively in military and civilian capacities; a.d.c. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico; milit. Adviser, HM Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar; chief of staff to Rajan of Sarawak; dep. Marshal, US. Chmn, Flashman and Bottomly Ltd; dir. British Opium Trading Co; governor, Rugby School; hon. Pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females.  Publications: Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life; Twixt Cossack and Cannon; The Case Against Army Reform.  Clubs: White's, United Service, Blackjack (Batavia).  Recreations: oriental studies, angling.  Address: Gandamack Lodge, Ashby, Leics. -Who's Who entry.

Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail.  You will have read, in Tom Brown, how I was expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error.  I knew better than to mix my drinks, even at seventeen.  I mention this, not in self-defence, but in the interests of strict truth.  This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years.  Why shouldn't I?  When a man is as old as I am, and knows himself thoroughly for what he was and is, he doesn't much care.  I'm not ashamed, you see; never was--and I have enough on what Society would consider the credit side of the ledger--a knighthood, a Victoria Cross, high rank, and some popular fame.  So I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer in Cardigan's Hussars; tall, masterful, and roughly handsome I was in those days (even Hughes allowed that I was big and strong, and had considerable powers of being pleasant), and say that it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward--and, oh yes, a toady.  Hughes said more or less all these things, and his description was pretty fair, except in matters of detail such as the one I've mentioned.  But he was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts.