THE MIRAGE OF THE MAP.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXII, Issue 33, 22 January 1912, Page 3

THE MIRAGE OF THE MAP.

AN INTERROGATION. (By Norman Angell, author of “The Groat Illusion.”) The press of Europe and America is very busy discussing the lessons of the diplomatic conflict which has just been ended and the military conflict which lias just begun. And the outstanding impression which , one gets from most of these essays in high politics—whether French, Italian, or British—is that we have been and are witnessing part of a great world movement, the setting 'in motion of Titanic forces “deop-set in primordial needs and impulses.”

For months those in the secrets of the Chancellories have spoken with bated breath—as though in the presence of some vision of Armageddon. On the strength of this more talk of war by the three nations, vast commercial interests have been embarrassed, fortunes have been lost and won on the Bourses, banks have suspended payment, some thousands have been ruined; while the fact that, the fourth and fifth nations have actually gone to war has raised all sorts of further possibilities of conflict, not alone in Europe, but in Asia, with remoter danger of religious fanaticism and all its sequelae. Phrases v. Facts. The needs therefore that can have provoked a conflict of these dimensions must be “Primordial” indeed. In fact one authority assures us that what we have seen going on is “the struggle for life among men ,, —that struggle which has its parallel in Hie whole of sentient existence.

Well, I will put it to yon, as a matter worth just a moment or two of consideration, that this conflict is about nothing of the sort; that it is about a perfectly futile matter, one which the immense major.'ty of the German, English, French, Italian, and Turkish people could afford to treat with the completest indifference. For, to the vast majority of these 250,000,000 people more or less, if does not matter two straws whether Morocco or. some vague African swamp near the Equator is administered by German, French, Italian or Turkish officials, so long as it is well administered. Or rather one should go further: if French, German, or Italian colonisation of the past is any guide, the nation which wins in the conqiiest for territory of this sort lias added a, wealth-draining incubus. France has got a new empire, we are told; she has Avon a great victory she is growing and expanding and is richer by something whiph her rjyals are the poorer for not having.

Lot us assume that she makes the same success of Morocco that she has made of her other possessions, of, say, Tunis, which represents one of the most successful of those operations of colonial expansion which have marked her history during the past 10 years. What has been the precise effect on French prosperity? In thirty years, at a cost of many million sterling (it is ,part ; of successful colonial administration in France never to let it bo known what the colonies really oast). France has founded in. Tunis a colony, in which to-day there are, excluding soldiers and officials, about 25,000 genuine French colonists : just the number by which the French population in France—the real France—is diminishing every year! .And the value of Tunis as a market does not even amount to the sum which France spends directly on its occupation and administration, to say nothing of the indirect extension of military burden which its conquest involved; and, of course, the market which it represents would still exist in some form, though England—or even Germany—administered the country. Real Expansion. There are to-day in France more Germans than there are Frenchmen in all the colonies that France has acquired in the last half-century, and German trade with France outweighs enormously the trade of France with all French colonies. France is today a better colony for the Germans than they could make of any exotic colony which France owns. “They tell me,” said a French Deputy recently (in a not quite original mot), “that the Germans are at Agadir. I know they are in the Champs-Elysees.” Which, of course, is in reality a much more serious matter.

And on the other side we are to assume that Germany lias during the period of France’s expansion—since the war—not expanded at all. .That she has been throttled and cramped —that she has not had her place in the sun; and that is why she must fight for it and endanger the security of her neighbours. Well, I put it to you again that all this in reality is false; that Germany has not been cramped or throttled ; that, on the contrary, as wo recognise when we got away from the mirage of the map, her expansion has been the wonder of the world. She has added 20,000,000 to her popula-tion—one-half the present population of France—during a period in which the French population has actually diminished. Of all the nations in Europe, she has cut the biggest swath in flm development of world trade, industry and influence. Despite the fact that she has not “expanded” in the sense of mere political dominion, a proportion of her population, equivalent to the white population of the whole colonial British Empire, make their living, or the best part of it, from the development and exploitation of territory outside her borders. Germany’s Rea! Colonies.

Millions of Gormans 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. What feeds them are countries which Germany has never “owned” and never hopes to “own”: Brazil, Argentine, the United .States, India, Australia, Canada, Russia, France, and England. These are Germany’s real colonies. All this diplomatic and military conflict and rivalry, this waste of .wealth, the unspeakable foulness which Tripoli is revealing, are reserved for things which both sides to the quarrel could sacrifice, not merely without loss, but with profit.

Is it not time that the man in the street, verily, I Imlieve, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his bettors, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology, insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportion, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human cooperation ?