VII.

While Government is absorbed in Protection and the Church, it has no time for the general interests of the country. England’s strength has lain in her comparative freedom from these preoccupations. In France the Protectionists have persuaded the electorate Edition: current; Page: [xii] that expansion must be sought in colonies acquired and retained at an immense cost; and as a corollary France has had to enter into conflict with England in every quarter of the globe, has had to sacrifice a customer who took 30 per cent. of our exports for the sake of a set of discontented officials or soldiers or poor natives who after twenty-five or thirty years only take 10 per cent. And this policy led to Fashoda. It is high time that those who assume the direction of foreign affairs should know rather more than they do of economics: politics must gradually be more and more directed by economic considerations, but not in the sense of a return to commercial wars, as is held by too many Protectionists who accept this view. For the present I will give one instance of what I mean. While every one is thinking of Morocco, and public opinion in France plays with the notion of the partition of the Austrian Empire and a German occupation of Trieste, the Customs Union of Germany and the Low Countries, mooted in 1900, and a first step to political union, is passed by unnoticed. Holland is the emporium for Germany, Rotterdam is the port for the Rhine, in spite of all attempts to make the united navies go up as far as Cologne or make a port of Emden, where there is never anything but a few dredges and fishing-smacks. The project is supported in two newspapers, the Hague Courant and the Avondpost, though it is dangerous in the last degree to Dutch independence, and in 1901 and 1902 a number of German pamphlets by Messrs. Stubmann, von Hale, and Anton advocated the scheme. Fortunately there are great economic difficulties in Edition: current; Page: [xiii] its way. The Low Countries are Free Trade, and the union would involve the adoption of the German Customs tariff, with free ports like Hamburg and Bremen. It threatens the very existence of Holland as a nation. It can only be saved by an alliance between France and England to support Holland against any attempt on the part of Germany to win it over by bribery or threats, which must be checked by some such fiscal union as I am laying before the House, i.e., “The abolition by France of surtaxes on extra European goods introduced from a European country and the reduction by England of duties on wines.”