Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/194

182 tariff, that the economic sword of Germany was unsheathed. That date marks approximately a very great change in the arts of transport to which due weight is not always attached. It was then that British-built railways in America and British steel-built ships on the Atlantic began to carry bulk-cargoes.

What this new fact of the carriage of bulk—wheat, coal, iron ore, petroleum—means will be realised if we reflect that in Western Canada to-day a community of a million people raise the cereal food of twenty millions, and that the other nineteen millions are at a distance—in Eastern Canada, the Eastern United States, and Europe. Prior to 1878 relatively light cargoes of such commodities as cotton, timber, and coal had been transported over the ocean by sailing ship, but the whole bulk of the cargoes of the world was insignificant as measured by the standards of to-day. Germany grasped the idea that under the new conditions it was possible to grow man-power where you would, on imported food and raw material, and therefore in Germany itself, for strategical use.

Up to this time the Germans, like the British, had freely emigrated, but the German no less than the British populations in the new