lish, American, and Dutch companies, and the
Chinese Government has largely confided the construction and management of
its railroads to English, French, and German companies.

Now, in many countries where this happens, the Government is not strong
enough or permanent enough to guarantee proper security of tenure to the
foreign company to which it grants a concession; very likely some official
is bribed to grant the concession to one company and then bribed by another
company to cancel it, or the Government is overthrown by a revolution
and its successor cancels the concessions it has granted. By this means,
British workmen may be thrown out of work and their employment may pass
to workmen in the United States or Germany. Consequently, foreign
Governments--the Governments of civilised countries--gradually begin to
intervene and give protection to their subjects who have concessions in
such countries, provided that they have obtained their concessions in a
respectable and proper manner. Competition between the different foreign
companies then grows up; their Governments gradually begin to support them
against each other in this competition, until at last it becomes necessary
for the different Governments, if bad feeling is to be avoided, to try to
arrive at some arrangement among themselves, fixing the way in which
the concessions granted by this or that semi-civilised country shall be
distributed among the subjects of the Great Powers. Something like this has
been recently happening in China.

To a certain extent this line of action seems to be necessary in dealing
with backward countries, and it may be made mutually beneficial both to
those countries themselves and to the commerce of the Great Powers, but,
on the other hand, the whole policy is obviously liable to great abuse.
Consequently, every self-respecting Government knows that all matters
relating to concessions must be treated with the greatest caution and
forbearance, and that the interests of all concerned will be best served
in the long run by gradually helping backward countries along the path of
civilisation and strengthening their Governments so that they may be able
to assume complete control of their own finance and commercial enterprises.

We have now described roughly the personal and the commercial work of the
Foreign Office. This work covers all the immediate interests of individual
British citizens in regard to foreign countries. If each British su