Supposing that Germany or any other conqueror were to put on the output of the mines a duty of 50 per cent. What would she get, and what would be the result? The output of the South African mines to-day is, roughly, $150,000,000 a year, so that she would get about $75,000,000 a year.[34] The annual total income of Germany is calculated at something like $15,000,000,000, so that a tribute of $75,000,000 would hold about the same proportion to Germany's total income that, say, fifteen cents a day would to a man in receipt of $10,000 a year. It would represent, say, the expenditure of a man with an income of $2000 or $2500 a year upon, say, his evening cigars. Could one imagine such a householder in his right mind committing burglary and murder in order to economize a dollar a week? Yet that would be the position of the German Empire entering upon a great and costly war for the purpose of exacting $75,000,000 a year from the South African mines; or, rather, the situation for the German Empire would be a great deal worse than that. For this householder having committed burglary and murder for the sake of his dollar a week (the German Empire, that is, having entered into one of the most frightful wars of history to exact its tribute of seventy-five millions) would then find that in order to get this dollar he had to jeopardize many of the investments upon which the bulk of his income depended. On the morrow of imposing a tax of fifty per cent. on the mines there would be such a slump in a class of security now dealt in by every considerable stock exchange in the world that there would hardly be a considerable business firm in Europe unaffected thereby. In England, they know of the difficulty that a relatively mild fiscal attack, delivered rather for social and moral than economic reasons, upon a class of property like the brewing trade provokes. What sort of outcry, therefore, would be raised throughout the world when every South African mining share in the world lost at one stroke half its value, and a great many of them lost all their value? Who would invest money in the Transvaal at all if property were to be subject to that sort of shock? Investors would argue that though it be mines to-day, it might be other forms of property to-morrow, and South Africa would find herself in the position of being able hardly to borrow a quarter for any purpose whatsoever, save at usurious and extortionate rates of interest. The whole of South African trade and industry would, of course, feel the effect, and South Africa as a market would immediately begin to dwindle in importance. Those businesses bound up with South African affairs would border on the brink of ruin, and many of them topple over. Is that the way efficient Germany would set about the development of her newly-acquired Empire? She would soon find that she had a ruined Colony on her hands. If in South Africa the sturdy Dutch and English stock did not produce a George Washington with a better material and moral case for independence than George Washington ever had, then history has no meaning. If it costs England a billion and a quarter to conquer Dutch South Africa, what would it cost Germany to conquer Anglo-Dutch South Africa? Such a policy could not, of course, last six months, and Germany would end by doing what Great Britain has ended by doing—she would renounce all attempt to exact a tribute or commercial advantage other than that which is the result of free co-operation with the South African people. In other words, she would learn that the policy which Great Britain has adopted was not adopted by philanthropy, but in the hard school of bitter experience. Germany would see that the last word in colonial statesmanship is to exact nothing from your Colonies, and where the greatest colonial power of history has been unable to follow any other policy, a poor intruder in the art of colonial administration would not be likely to prove more successful, and she, too, would find that the only way to treat Colonies is to treat them as independent or foreign territories, and the only way to own them is to make no attempt at exercising any of the functions of ownership. All the reasons which gave force to this principle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been reinforced a hundredfold by the modern contrivances of credit and capital, quick communication, popular government, popular press, the conditions and cost of warfare—the whole weight, indeed, of modern progress. It is not a question here of theorizing, of the erection of an elaborate thesis, nor is it a question of arguing what the relations of Colonies ought to be. The differences between the Imperialist and the Anti-imperialist do not enter into the discussion at all. It is simply a question of what the unmistakable outstanding facts of experience have taught, and we all know, Imperialists and their opponents alike, that whatever the relations with the Colonies are to be, that relationship must be fixed by the free consent of the Colonies, by their choice, not ours. Sir J.R. Seeley notes in his book, "The Expansion of England," that because the early Spanish Colonies were in a true sense of the word "possessions," Britons acquired the habit of talking of "possessions" and "ownership," and their ideas of colonial policy were vitiated during three centuries, simply by the fatal hypnotism of an incorrect word. Is it not time that we shook off the influence of those disastrous words? Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, are not "possessions." They are no more possessions than is Argentina or Brazil, and the nation which conquered England, which even captured London, would be hardly nearer to the conquest of Canada or Australia than if it happened to occupy Constantinople or St. Petersburg. Why, therefore, do we tolerate the loose talk which assumes that the master of London is also master of Montreal, Vancouver, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Melbourne, and Sydney? Have we not had about enough of this ignorant chatter, which is persistently blind to the simplest and most elementary facts of the case? And have not the English, of all people of the world, a most direct interest in aiding the general realization of these truths in Europe? Would not that general realization add immensely to the security of their so-called Empire?
CHAPTER VIII
THE FIGHT FOR "THE PLACE IN THE SUN"
How Germany really expands—Where her real Colonies are—How she exploits without conquest—What is the difference between an army and a police force?—The policing of the world—Germany's share of it in the Near East.
What is the practical outcome of the situation which the facts detailed in the last chapter make plain? Must nations like Germany conclude that, because there can be no duplication of the fight for empty territory which took place between European nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and because talk of the German conquest of British Colonies is childish nonsense, Germany must therefore definitely surrender any hope of expansion, and accept a secondary position because she happens to have "come too late into the world"? Are Germans with all their activities and scientific thoroughness, and with such a lively sense of the difficulty of finding room in the world for the additional million of Germans every year quietly to accept the status quo?
If our thoughts were not so distorted by misleading political imagery, it is doubtful whether it would ever occur to us that such a "problem" existed.
When one nation, say England, occupies a territory, does it mean that that territory is "lost" to Germans? We know this to be an absurdity. Germany does an enormous and increasing trade with the territory that has been pre-empted by the Anglo-Saxon race. Millions of Germans in Germany gain their livelihood by virtue of German enterprise and German industry in Anglo-Saxon countries—indeed, it is the bitter and growing complaint of Englishmen that they are being driven out of these territories by the Germans; that where originally British shipping was universal in the East,[35] German shipping is now coming to occupy the prominent place; that the trade of whole territories which Englishmen originally had to themselves is now being captured by Germans, and this not merely where the fiscal arrangements are more or less under the control of the British Government, as in the Crown Colonies, but in those territories originally British but now independent, like the United States, as well as in those territories which are in reality independent, though nominally still under British control, like Australia and Canada.
Moreover, why need Germany occupy the extraordinary position of phantom "ownership," which England occupies, in order to enjoy all the real benefits which in our day result from a Colonial Empire? More Germans have found homes in the United States in the last half-century than have Englishmen in all their Colonies. It is calculated that between ten and twelve millions of the population of the United States are of direct German descent It is true, of course, that Germans do not live under their flag, but it is equally true that they do not regret that fact, but rejoice in it! The majority of German emigrants do not desire that the land to which they go shall have the political character of the land which they leave behind. The fact that in adopting the United States they have shed something of the German tradition and created a new national type, partaking in part of the English and in part of the German, is, on the whole, very much to their advantage—and incidentally to ours.