A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE POLICY.
But, for the reasons already explained, in replying to Mr. Williams I do not rely wholly on British figures. It is from the double testimony of British and foreign figures that I deduce the fact that of all our customers Germany is one of the best. The practical moral of this fact is sufficiently obvious. In private business a tradesman does not go out of his way to offend a good customer, even though that customer is also a keen trade competitor. He bestirs himself instead to keep ahead, if possible, of his rival without doing anything to destroy the mutually profitable trade relationship between them. Such palpable considerations of expediency are ignored by our latter-day Protectionists, among whom Mr. Williams deservedly ranks as a leading prophet. Their ambition is to induce the Colonies to discriminate in their tariffs between goods from the Mother Country and goods from foreign countries, admitting the former on favourable terms and penalising the latter. It is avowedly against German competition that this policy is directed, and we are light-heartedly told to risk our trade with one of our best customers on the chance of encouraging trade with Colonies which so far have shown much more eagerness to sell their goods to us than to buy ours. Even supposing that this policy succeeded in destroying the whole of the German export trade to our Colonies and Possessions, the possible gain to us would be very small.
Here are the figures of the trade of our three principal Colonies with the United Kingdom and with Germany, derived in each case from the Colonial returns:—
Trade of the following British Possessions with the United Kingdom and with Germany.
Ten Years’ Average, in Millions Sterling or Millions Rx.
| Imports. | Exports. | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| From Germany. | From U.K. | To Germany. | To U.K. | |
| India (Rx) | ·9 | 58·4 | 3·8 | 36·4 |
| Australasia | ·9 | 27·4 | ·7 | 28·2 |
| Brit. N. America | ·8 | 9·1 | ·1 | 10·1 |
Thus these great groups of Colonies and Dependencies together buy rather less than £3,000,000 worth of German goods against more than £60,000,000 worth of British goods. Yet in order to crush this fractional competition of Germany in neutral markets, in order to scrape up these crumbs that have fallen from our table, we are invited to risk the loss of a direct trade with Germany worth nearly ten times as much as all the crumbs heaped up together.
CHAPTER III.
Picturesque Exaggerations.
It has now been shown, first that there is nothing in the general figures of our import and export trade to warrant the alarmist view expressed in “Made in Germany,” and secondly, that the country whose rivalry is supposed to be ruining us is one of the best of all our customers. What I propose to do in the present chapter is to examine some of the detailed statements in Mr. Williams’s book and to show that in many cases the inferences he draws are so seriously exaggerated as to amount to a positive misrepresentation of the facts. For the purposes of this examination we cannot do better than begin with the chapter which Mr. Williams devotes to chemicals. “The chemical trade,” he tells us, “is the barometer of a nation’s prosperity.... The discomforting significance of the appearance of chemicals in this Black List of mine will, therefore, be at once apparent.” More follows about a “Bottomless pit for capital,” and “Germany seizing the occasion while England has let hers slide,” and so on.