Investments of our capital abroad bring in gratuitous imports as interest. The expenditure of this tribute gives employment. It is, however, parasitic employment. The employees may be more pampered than productive employees; and this, combined with the disappearance of manufacturing towns and their replacement by attractive residential resorts, may produce an air of increased prosperity and refinement in all classes; but it does not provide suitable employment for the rougher workers discharged by the discarded factories, who have to be got rid of by Assisted Emigration or kept quiet by doles. If the process were unchecked England would become a country of luxurious hotels and pleasure cities inhabited by wealthy hotel guests and hotel servants with their retinue of importers and distributors, all completely dependent on foreign tribute from countries which might at any moment tax the incomes of absentee capitalists to extinction, and leave us to starve. 145 39 FOREIGN TRADE AND THE FLAG Only freshly saved capital can be exported. The capital consumed in the establishment of mines, railways, and fixed industrial plant cannot be shipped abroad. When the home market supplied by them dries up through change or exhaustion of demand, the plant must either close down or seek markets abroad. This is the beginning of foreign trade. Trade with civilized nations is hampered by foreign protective duties or by the competition of the manufacturers on the spot. Undeveloped countries which have no tariffs and no manufactures are the most lucrative markets; but the ships’ crews and cargoes must be defended against massacre and plunder by the natives. This leads to the establishment of trading stations where British law is enforced. The annexation of the station makes it an outpost of the British Empire; and its boundary becomes a frontier. The policing of the frontier soon necessitates the inclusion of the lawless district beyond the frontier; and thus the empire grows without premeditation until its centre shifts to the other side of the earth. 150 40 EMPIRES IN COLLISION Collision of the expanding empires. Fashoda incidents. The German demand for a place in the sun. The war of 1914-18. Expansion of professional soldiering into conscription. The strains set up automatically by the pressure of capitalistic commerce, and not the depravity of human nature, are the causes of modern wars. Its horrors are therefore not a ground for despair of political mankind. We celebrate the end of the Great War, not the beginning of it. The real origin of the mischief. 152 41 THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE