with the German people is worth the paper it is written on?  That the country and its inhabitants have forfeited all claims to trust?  That no one, in future, should make a bargain with a German, knowing that he is a dishonorable and dishonored man?...  Germany has made many blunders—­an almost inconceivable number of blunders; but this blundering crime is surely the culminating point of blunder.  Did any nation ever before deliberately throw away its political, commercial, financial, and social credit to no purpose?  To gain what?  England as an adversary, and the contempt of the whole civilized world.  Her treatment of the poor Belgian civilians has added to contempt, loathing and scorn.

Now, gentlemen, you see our problem.  At, the end of this war we shall have Germans again as trade rivals; if there is a German State our German rivals will be backed by their State.  They will, as they have done before, steal our inventions, use trickery and fraud to oust us from world markets, and we know now that we need not expect any bargain to be binding.  I am not a commercial man; science is supposed to be above such trickery.  Yet I read a few days ago, not as a single example, but only as the last I happen to remember, an article by a distinguished American professor, protesting with great moderation that an important scientific generalization which he published in 1902 had been annexed, without acknowledgment, by a versatile and adroit professor in the University of Berlin—­an acquaintance of my own—­in the year 1906; and it was not until 1910 that the latter was made to confess his guilt, with much subterfuge and blustering.

Commerce, indeed, is in Germany regarded as war; we now know it, and we must meet war by war.  How is that war to be waged?

I can see only two methods.  One is recommended by a writer in The Observer of the 10th inst., who acknowledges himself to have been a lifelong free trader.  His remedy is a 25 per cent. duty on all German goods, and on German goods only, imported (or rather offered for import) into Great Britain and her colonies, and also that German passenger liners and freight boats should not be allowed to call at any one of the ports of the empire.  His reasons are fully stated in his letter; it is signed “A City Merchant.”

The other method is perhaps less apt to offend free trade susceptibilities; it is to impose on what remains of our opponents at the conclusion of this war free trade for a term of years.  It remains to be seen whether we shall be powerful enough to insist on this measure, or to persuade our allies that it is one likely to fulfill the proposed end.  It is, so far as I see, the only other alternative.