Page:The battle of Dorking; (IA battleofdorking00chesrich).pdf/21

Rh the fullest hospitality of these Islands has been extended to our Teuton brethren; while they were invited to successfully compete on their merits with one English industry after another.

That they would not rest content with these advantages, this political and commercial equality, that they would want to organize secret treachery, to spy out our weaknesses and hide bombs in their bedrooms, that—to the simple Briton of a few weeks ago—would have seemed impossible.

He now knows what primitive passions may lurk behind a plausible commercialism secretly disappointed in its immoderate greed.

It is in the alliance of despotic militarism with bureaucratic intellectual sophistry that has lain a new peril for the world, and one yet to be fully realized by the German people, when many of the hasty and speculative structures of her self-conscious and academic Protectionism are discovered to be as unsound as the quasi-religious aphorisms of the Kaiser.

In spite of these confident assurances it may be the fate of that arrogant leader to find himself at war with "things," stony facts, economic laws that crush the transgressor, as well as with an indignant world.

Meanwhile—our armies have fought bravely and held their own in the greatest battle, the most ferocious conflict the world ever dreamed of.

Our unconquered fleet, after the tradition of four centuries, is still "looking for the enemy."