IV
It will be said that the standard of wellbeing of the German Empire has advanced pari passu with her foreign trade, and that trade needs a secure market. Hence the requirement of a rich colonial domain, from which the German trader can not be excluded by hostile customs laws. Perhaps we have here an adequate justification for Germany’s Morning Land aspirations. Germany is an industrial nation; so also are England and the United States and France, and Russia will soon become one. Now, is it not inevitable that the trade of the industrial nations shall be directed toward the non-industrial? That is, towards the tropics and the subtropical belts? The argument is trite, but it looks reasonable enough to deserve consideration.
Germany is indeed an industrial nation, and so are we. But the German industries are not the same as ours, nor can they ever be the same, so long as the German genius and natural environment continue to differ from ours. So long as difference exists, some German goods will command our markets, whether we pursue protectionist policies or not. Germany need not write our laws for us in order to control our markets; she has an indefeasible title to those markets so long as she maintains superiority in supplying our needs. And the same thing is true of the markets of England and France and Russia. They take German goods eagerly, in vast quantities. Wipe out Germany’s trade with industrial states, and her commerce is practically at an end.
The trade between nations of rich and varied industries is alone capable of indefinite expansion. Yet the delusion persists that a nation’s closed trade with a subject state is somehow of superior importance. Such trade is admittedly incapable of great development. Only semi-barbarous peoples will submit to foreign control of their trade; and such peoples produce little beyond the requirements of home consumption, and therefore, having hardly anything to sell, can buy but little. But colonial trade, meagre as it is, may be monopolized and made to yield large profits. The trade between industrial nations, since it is essentially competitive, diffuses its benefits throughout the trading nations. Hence these benefits are easily overlooked. The rapid enrichment of a few houses engaged in the colonial trade gives visible evidence of national gain.
Out of the overestimation of the value of the colonial trade arises, unquestionably, some part of the international jealousies now working out their nature upon the field of battle. Control of the trade of the Levant would advance the general welfare of the German people in very limited measure; but it would greatly enrich a small number of traders, and this very fact of the concentration of the gains gives them added potency in determining political relations.