The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National AdvantageAngell, Norman
History
The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Angell, Norman
Commercial policy; Disarmament; Imperialism; War; War, Cost of
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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