Order was just as well maintained in Alsace-Lorraine before the German conquest as it was after, and for that reason Germany has not benefited by the conquest. But order was not maintained in California, and would not have been as well maintained under Mexican as under American rule, and for that reason America has benefited by the conquest of California. France has benefited by the conquest of Algeria, England by that of India, because in each case the arms were employed not, properly speaking, for conquest at all, but for police purposes, for the establishment and maintenance of order; and, so far as they achieved that object, their role was a useful one.
How does this distinction affect the practical problem under discussion? Most fundamentally. Germany has no need to maintain order in England, nor England in Germany, and the latent struggle therefore between these two countries is futile. It is not the result of any inherent necessity of either people; it is the result merely of that woeful confusion which dominates statecraft today, and it is bound, so soon as that confusion is cleared up, to come to an end.
Where the condition of a territory is such that the social and economic cooperation of other countries with it is impossible, we may expect the intervention of military force, not as the result of the “annexationist illusion,” but as the outcome of real social forces pushing to the maintenance of order. That is the story of England in Egypt, or, for that matter, in India. But foreign nations have no need to maintain order in the British Colonies, nor in the United States; and though there might be some such necessity in the case of countries like Venezuela, the last few years have taught us that by bringing these countries into the great economic currents of the world, and so setting up in them a whole body of interests in favor of order, more can be done than by forcible conquest. We occasionally hear rumors of German designs in Brazil and elsewhere, but even the modicum of education possessed by the average European statesman makes it plain to him that these nations are, like the others, “too firmly set” for military occupation and conquest by an alien people.
It is one of the humors of the whole Anglo-German conflict that so much has the British public been concerned with the myths and bogies of the matter that it seems calmly to have ignored the realities. While even the wildest Pan-German has never cast his eyes in the direction of Canada, he has cast them, and does cast them, in the direction of Asia Minor; and the political activities of Germany may centre on that area, for precisely the reasons which result from the distinction between policing and conquest, which I have drawn. German industry is coming to have dominating interests in the Near East, and as those interests—her markets and investments—increase, the necessity for better order in, and the better organization of, those territories increases in corresponding degree. Germany may need to police Asia Minor.
What interest have we in attempting to prevent her? It may be urged that she would close the markets of those territories against us. But even if she attempted it, which she is never likely to do, a Protectionist Asia Minor organized with German efficiency would be better from the point of view of trade than a Free Trade Asia Minor organized à la Turque. Protectionist Germany is one of the best markets in Europe. If a second Germany were created in the Near East, if Turkey had a population with the German purchasing power and the German tariff, the markets would be worth some two hundred to two hundred and fifty millions instead of some fifty to seventy-five. Why should we try to prevent Germany increasing our trade?
It is true that we touch here the whole problem of the fight for the open door in the undeveloped territories. But the real difficulty in this problem is not the open door at all, but the fact that Germany is beating England—or England fears she is beating her in those territories where she has the same tariff to meet that Germany has, or even a smaller one; and that she is even beating England in the territories that the English already “own”—in their Colonies, in the East, in India. How, therefore, would England’s final crushing of Germany in the military sense change anything? Suppose England crushed her so completely that she “owned” Asia Minor and Persia as completely as she owns India or Hong Kong, would not the German merchant continue to beat her even then, as he is beating her now, in that part of the East over which she already holds political sway? Again, how would the disappearance of the German navy affect the problem one way or the other?
Moreover, in this talk of the open door in the undeveloped territories, we again seem to lose all our sense of proportion. English trade is in relative importance first with the great nations—the United States, France, Germany, Argentina, South America generally—after that with the white Colonies; after that with the organized East; and last of all, and to a very small extent, with the countries concerned in this squabble for the open door—territories in which the trade really is so small as hardly to pay for the making and upkeep of a dozen battleships.
When the man in the street, or, for that matter, the journalistic pundit, talks commercial diplomacy, his arithmetic seems to fall from him. Some years since the question of the relative position of the three Powers in Samoa exercised the
