"Not many years ago I sat on the club veranda at Singapore and counted twenty-five funnels of a single German steamer line. From Singapore I went to North Borneo; there was but one line, a German, and that line carried the British mail. Later I went to Siam from Singapore. It was on a steamer of this same German line, carrying British mail. There was no other. Thence I went to Hongkong by the same excellent German line. Later I went to Australia--it was by one of this same line. To Java and the Eastern Archipelago, to Penang--it was always this vast German company, doing not only all the German, but the British mail service as well. The German traders, with whom I mixed freely, marvelled at the infantile generosity with which Great Britain opened all her ports to German enterprise, although long-headed people shook their heads at the thought of German skippers having a better acquaintance with British waters than their own people. "Nowhere in the British colonial world have I found the slightest evidence of commercial monopoly and certainly no favouring of Englishmen at the expense of Germans. Even in India the German commercial traveller has roamed at will and driven Englishmen out of business under the very noses of the Calcutta Council. "In the Imperial German colonies, on the other hand, competing English traders have been treated to a systematic course of petty official restrictions so vexatious that finally they have given up the attempt to do business under German conditions. When I was in German New Guinea this official persecution went so far that a British trading steamer was even forbidden to get water in order to force it to abandon trade with the natives of that neighbourhood. "Some British colonies, it is true, do now discriminate in favour of the mother country, but the colonies who do that are self-governing and therefore beyond the mother country's control in economic matters, like Canada. But in so-called Crown colonies like Hongkong, the German trader has the same advantage as any other." _England has not abused her power at sea_, at least since the eighteenth century, any more than you, previous to this present war, have abused your power on land. Not only has she not stood in the way of your development, but on the contrary _she has given you fair and free access to her markets, with unparalleled liberality_.