Political and Economic Rapprochement
A Germanbusiness firm never lets go of a customer once it seizes him. Of course that is an extreme statement, for customers die or change their country, or even revolt against the importunities of the German bagman. Still, it may be taken as a fact that Germany exhibits a pertinacity in trade that rivals her pertinacity in war.
Now Foreign Trade in the conception of Germany does not mean, though it includes, the selling of goods; it means the destruction of all other than German interests. Politics and economics are convertible terms in the mind of the Fatherland. To absorb and make German the world—that is the idea woven in invisible thread in the fabrics she sells, written in invisible ink in her contracts, stamped in invisible letters on her metal goods.
Before the war she was fast reducing great free nations to economic serfdom, so that to buy a rat-trap they had to turn to Germany, who sold them, with a certain grim humour, even the very guns to fight her in, what she considered to be, an already won war.
She paralysed England, Russia, and France economically and politically, just as a snake paralyses its victims, and she was about to swallow them one after the other, and would have swallowed them only that she opened her mouth too soon.
Consider then the fate of a little nation entering into a political and economic rapprochement with this cormorant people who have so nearly devoured England:
The fate of the rabbit in the jaws that could swallow an ox.
H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RAPPROCHEMENTGermany: “You must cut your throat with this knife, otherwise I shall have to use force to you.”
A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RAPPROCHEMENTGermany: “You must cut your throat with this knife, otherwise I shall have to use force to you.”
A POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC RAPPROCHEMENT
Germany: “You must cut your throat with this knife, otherwise I shall have to use force to you.”