AN INTERESTING REPORT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1395, 8 May 1915, Page 4

AN INTERESTING REPORT.

Consular reports are seldom interesting to the casual reader, but occasionally there is an illumiuatiug paragraph to be found among the surveys of trade conditions and the pages of arid statistics. Recently there reached Wellington a copy of a document that was laid before the House ot Commons a few months ago. It is a “Report for the Y"ear 1913 on the Trade of Germany, edited at the Foreign Office and the Board of Trade.” The report was written before the outbreak oT war, but it contains the following passage : More particularly from the second kali of 1913 onwards the necessity of a larger German export seemed uppermost in the public mind ; the whole Press suddenly overflowed with articles on Germany’s economic mission abroad, on what is called Germany’s Weltwirtschaft. Again and again it was pointed out that among the three leading industrial countries of the world Germany found herself by a long way in the least favourable position. The United Kingdom had her vast colonial Empire as a natural national market ; the United States had a whole continent, while Germany, as the last-comer, had no such privileged territories. As her colonies could, at best, be regarded as future sources of supply for various raw materials, she must regard the world as her trading empire and rely exclusively upon her energies and enterprise to conquer it.” The well-discipliued newspapers of Germany do not enter upon campaigns of this kind without official sanction and encouragement. The same report quotes in a later paragraph a sentence from a document issued by the German Statistical Office ; “Upon an agricultural area which has in size remained practically unchanged, German agriculture has endeavoured to supply a population increasing in number and wealth in accordance with the increased demand, with the result that food is imported in increasing quantities for the upkeep of the population.” The accompanying tables show that Germany imported more than ,£38,000,000 worth of corn and cereals in 19x2, in addition to huge quantities of other foodstuffs.

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