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 twenty millions who have been added to Germany’s population since the war had had to depend on their country’s political conquest they would have had to starve.  What feeds them are countries which Germany has never “owned” and never hopes to “own”; Brazil, Argentina, the United States, India, Australia, Canada, Russia, France, and England. (Germany, which never spent a mark on its political conquest, to-day draws more tribute from South America than does Spain, which has poured out mountains of treasure and oceans