A German business firm never lets go of a customer once it seizes him.
Of course that is an extreme statement, for customers die or change
their country, or even revolt against the importunities of the German
bagman. Still, it may be taken as a fact that Germany exhibits a
pertinacity in trade that rivals her pertinacity in war.
Now Foreign Trade in the conception of Germany does not mean, though it
includes, the selling of goods; it means the destruction of all other
than German interests. Politics and economics are convertible terms in
the mind of the Fatherland. To absorb and make German the world--that
is the idea woven in invisible thread in the fabrics she sells, written
in invisible ink in her contracts, stamped in invisible letters on her
metal goods.
Before the war she was fast reducing great free nations to economic
serfdom, so that to buy a rat-trap they had to turn to Germany, who
sold them, with a certain grim humour, even the very guns to fight her
in, what she considered to be, an already won war.
She paralysed England, Russia, and France economically and politically,
just as a snake paralyses its victims, and she was about to swallow
them one after the other, and would have swallowed them only that she
opened her mouth too soon.
Consider then the fate of a little nation entering into a political and
economic rapprochement with this cormorant people who have so nearly
devoured England:
The fate of the rabbit in the jaws that could swallow an ox.