England, Canada and the Great WarDesjardins, L. G. (Louis Georges)
History
England, Canada and the Great War
Desjardins, L. G. (Louis Georges)
Great Britain -- Colonies -- Canada; Imperialism; World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Canada
4--Mr. Bourassa's assertion that England aspires to dominate the world,
_economically_, _commercially_, is most positively contradicted by the
history of the last eighty years. Who does not know--and I cannot for a
moment suppose that Mr. Bourassa ignores it--that, nearly a century
ago, Great Britain, finally rallied in favour of a Free Trade Policy,
has opened her market free to the products of all the nations of the
world. Is that not a rather strange way of aspiring to an economical
domination! And whilst all the countries of the earth, the British
colonies as well as foreign nations, can freely sell their goods in the
British market, they protect their own markets by high customs
duties--in some cases almost prohibitive--against British goods.
National commercial statistics are opened to the "Nationalist" leader's
perusal as to any one else. If he had referred to them, he would have
learned that the Foreign Trade of Great Britain, in 1913, the year
preceding the outbreak of the war, amounted to $7,017,775,335; exports
were valued at $3,174,101,630; imports totalized $3,843,673,695,
exceeding the exports by the large amount of $669,572,065.
By looking at the figures, Mr. Bourassa would only have had to call upon
his common sense to draw the conclusion that England was certainly not
moving along an easy road to the commercial domination of the world by
maintaining a policy resulting in an import trade larger, by an annual
average of nearly twenty per cent., than her exportations.
Before the war, Germany, by rapid strides, had succeeded in attaining
the second rank amongst the great trading nations, coming next after
Great Britain. In the same year--1913--her Foreign Trade totalized
$5,351,500,000, divided as follows:--Imports $2,801,675,000; exports
$2,549,825,000.
The really wonderful industrial and commercial expansion of Germany,
during the last forty years previous to the war, offered another
opportunity to Mr. Bourassa to show his spite against Great Britain. He
would have been sorry not to make the best of it. Calling into play his
fertile imagination, he unhesitatingly charged England with deep rooted
jealousy of Germany's trade success and the guilty intent to crush it
out of existence.
To this absurd assertion--not using the word offensively, being always
determined to be courteous in any discussion I engage--I answered by
quoting the figures of the reciprocal relative external British and
German trade. In 1913, Great Britain sold to Germany goods to the amount
of $203,385,150, and bought German products for a total value of
$402,055,285. Great Britain's exports to Germany were then only about
fifty per cent of her imports from the same market. It is indeed
difficult to detect in such trade relations between two nations any sign
of the intent, on the part of the country buying from the other double
the value of her sales to her, to dominate her people commercially.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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