As however the Manifesto was designed for the general election, this theme was only sketched, and the greater part was occupied with matters of a more immediately practicable character. The proposed partition of China at that time seemed imminent, and our attention had been called to the efficiency of the German State organisation of foreign trade in comparison with the _laissez-faire_ policy which dominated our Foreign Office. We regarded our overseas trade as a national asset, and urged that the consular service should be revolutionised. "Any person who thinks this application of Socialism to foreign trade through the consular system impossible also thinks the survival of his country in the age of the Powers impossible. No German thinks it impossible. If he has not already achieved it, he intends to" (pp. 10, 11). We must "have in every foreign market an organ of commercially disinterested industrial intelligence. A developed consulate would be such an organ." "The consulate could itself act as broker, if necessary, and have a revenue from commissions, of which, however, the salaries of its officials should be strictly independent" (pp. 10 and 8). The present army should be replaced "by giving to the whole male population an effective training in the use of arms without removing them from civil life. This can be done without conscription or barrack life" by extending the half-time system to the age of 21 and training the young men in the other half. From the millions of men thus trained "we could obtain by voluntary enlistment a picked professional force of engineers, artillery, and cavalry, and as large a garrison for outlying provinces as we chose to pay for, if we made it attractive by the following reforms": full civil rights, a living wage, adequate superannuation after long service, and salaries for officers on the civil scale. The other reforms advocated included a minimum wage for labour, grants in aid for housing, freedom for municipal trading, municipal public-houses, and reorganisation of the machinery of education, as explained later. "The moral of it all is that what the British Empire wants most urgently in its government is not Conservatism, not Liberalism, not Imperialism, but brains and political science" (p. 93). [Illustration: GRAHAM WALLAS, IN 1891] FOOTNOTES: [30] Shaw has "vehemently protested" against this phrase, saying that he "put in six years of hard committee work to the astonishment of the vestrymen who had not expected (him) to be a man of business and a sticker at it." But I am still of opinion that the secondary effects of those six years on his knowledge of affairs and the lessons he has drawn from them in his writings and speeches have been of greater value to his innumerable readers and hearers than was his administrative diligence to the Parish of St. Pancras. [31] "Fabianism and the Empire," p. 26.