a given product for the home market and only $70 a
unit to produce an additional 100,000 units then there is a profit in
permanently selling this extra amount at any price above $70. To break
down a foreign competition it may pay _temporarily_ to sell at 60 or
even 30 dollars, in order to raise prices again after competition is
destroyed.

[8] Prof. Milloud's argument based upon the relative growth of British
and German exports is far from conclusive. He shows that in the period
from 1890-1903 to 1904-08 the German export trade increased only 75 per
cent while the British export trade increased 79 per cent. If we
consider the statistics for the subsequent period, 1909 to 1913 (which
figures were quite accessible to Prof. Milloud), we find that the
German export industry increased much more rapidly than did that of
Britain.

{126}

CHAPTER X

THE REVOLT AGAINST IMPERIALISM

What determines whether a backward country is to be exploited by its
own people or by some beneficent imperialistic power is not any
consideration of its own welfare, but the chance of profits held out to
certain adventurous financiers in the capitals of Europe. These modern
pioneers are a ruthless, dangerous group, with the bold, speculative
imagination that has marked adventurers since the world began. They
have a domestic and a foreign morality, an ethics for home consumption
and a fine contempt for "greasers" and "niggers." They know the
difference between five per cent. and twenty per cent., and their
business consists in investing their money at high rates of profit
(because the enterprise is hazardous) and then in taking out the hazard
by making their home government compel the fulfilment of their
impossible contracts.

The methods of these men are monotonously similar. They lend, they
invest, they support revolutions, they invoke "the protection of the
flag." They need not pay attention to the public opinion of the
backward countries; they do not believe such countries have a public
opinion. All that these speculators need is the support of their home
government, and that they may secure through bribery, newspaper
influence and patriotism. The first two cost money and are worth all
they cost; the third can be had for {127} nothing. As for the excuse
for intervention, it is that used by the wolf when he took a fancy to
the lamb. Money is loaned at usurious rates to some rogue who poses in
history as the President of