1 26 Hoiv to Pay for the Wat 



minor glass industry may mean success or failure to our 

 armies.' The whole year's value of Burma tungsten 

 (' Handbook of India ') was only /i 50,000. Yet the steel 

 and machinery of the world largely depended upon it. 

 Let the illustrations suffice. Despise not the day of small 

 things. Contempt of the efforts of their fellow-citizens has 

 ever been a chief weapon of British political economists. 

 What India, Australasia, South Africa, and Canada well 

 know is this : were Germany finally sunk for ever beneath 

 the ocean, they would be commercially and industrially 

 no whit the worse off. The two ruling factors are : to 

 produce as much and as diversely as possible, and at the 

 same time to obtain just values for the products. Towards 

 neither factor did Germany contribute. 



" Basic, again, to most industries are hides and skins, as 

 being the raw material of leather. The great resources of 

 India in this connection were exploited to the advantage 

 chiefly of Germany. Seventy per cent, went there direct. 

 Indeed, one of the chief officers of the Indian Civil Service 

 said to me, ' For years we have been running India for 

 the benefit of Germany.' Allowing for hyperbole, there 

 was too much truth in the remark, and it would have been 

 better for Germany had she been less hasty in grasping at 

 the still unripe fruit, for her grip of the reins was tightened 

 with each year. High officers of State in England, chosen 

 for office during a generation because of their views, 

 favourable or unfavourable, as to Ireland, were anyhow 

 favourable to Germans in India and Further India. So 

 Germans were firm in the saddle, and could even use the 

 spur. 



" So, too, the rice-milling trade passed out of British 

 hands, for British banks financed more than willingly the 

 German banks and trading firms by discounting their bills 

 without question, on the great scale, as to whether or not 

 they were merely accommodation bills. British rice was 

 bought for Germans with British money, taken to the 

 Continent to be milled — Germany getting the benefit of 

 the offal — whilst German steamers were supported by the 

 freights also financed by British money. Certainly the 

 British trade and the British mills went to ruin, but the 

 political economist had at most a sneer for the misfortune. 

 As aforesaid, all transactions are conducted for the sake of 

 a margin, extremely narrow in rice and steel and other 



' Thus confirming what I say on p. 131, on the advisability of establishing 

 a trade in optical goods in India and elsewhere within the Empire. 



