ssed.

We get, then, this: On the one side a nation extending enormously its
political dominion and yet diminishing in national force, if by
national force we mean the growth of a sturdy, enterprising, vigorous
people. (I am not denying that France is both wealthy and comfortable,
to a greater degree it may be than her rival; but she has not her
colonies to thank for it--quite the contrary.) On the other side, we
get immense expansion expressed in terms of those things--a growing and
vigorous population and the possibility of feeding them--and yet the
political dominion, speaking practically, has hardly been extended at
all.

Such a condition of things, if the common jargon of high politics means
anything, is preposterous. It takes nearly all meaning out of most that
we hear about "primordial needs," and the rest of it.

As a matter of fact, we touch here one of the vital confusions, which
is at the bottom of most of the present political trouble between
nations, and shows the power of the old ideas, and the old phraseology.

In the days of the sailing ship and the lumbering wagon dragging slowly
over all but impassable roads, for one country to derive any
considerable profit from another, it had, practically, to administer it
politically. But the compound steam engine, the railway, the telegraph,
have profoundly modified the elements of the whole problem. In the
modern world political dominion is playing a more and more effaced role
as a factor in commerce; the non-political factors have in practise
made it all but inoperative. It is the case with every modern nation
actually that the outside territories which it exploits most
successfully are precisely those of which it does not "own" a foot.
Even with the most characteristically colonial of all--Great
Britain--the greater part of her overseas trade is done with countries
which she makes no attempt to "own," control, coerce, or dominate--and
incidentally she has ceased to do any of these things with her
colonies.

Millions of Germans in Prussia and Westphalia derive profit or make
their living out of countries to which their political dominion in no
way extends. The modern German exploits South America by remaining at
home. Where, forsaking this principle, he attempts to work through
political power, he approaches futility. German colonies are colonies
"pour rire." The Government has to bribe Germans to go to them; her
trade with them is microscopic; and if the