We will tell Mr. Balfour first what we would not
have done in the case of a Power like Germany which had penalised a Colony for giving preferential treatment to the Mother- country. To begin with, we would not have become the drudge of that Power throughout the world. We would not have smoothed her path in Samoa. We would not have made the Yangtse agreement with her,—an agreement so useful to Germany, so useless to us. Next, we would not have gone hand-in-hand with Germany to collect very doubtful debts in South America, and, at the risk of creating ill-feeling with the United States, have protected Germany from the rebuff she must have incurred from America if she had tried to enforce her Venezuelan claims alone. Finally, we would not have striven, till public opinion in England absolutely forbade so mad a project, to find the money and to secure the diplomatic support necessary to build a German railway between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. We played the complacent drudge for Germany in these matters without a murmur during the period when she was " attacking " Canada, and we only find the need for bitting her when Mr. Chamberlain has a new policy to put on the political market. Our answer, then, to Mr. Balfour is that we would not do absolutely nothing when Germany interfered with Canada, but instead we would pursue the very reverse of that policy of doing kindnesses all round the world to Germany which he has pursued. We should, no doubt, refuse to slap our own faces by inflicting on our own commerce the burden of a retaliatory tariff, but that would not prevent us from showing Germany that she could not strike at us without getting a rap back, and of a kind that would fall on her knuckles and not on ours.
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