Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/240

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DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

national Trust in the case of a few critically important positions, each Nation must be mistress in her own house, and that principle holds in regard to South Africa and Australia. Any other principle would leave the seeds of future quarrels and would impede disarmament.

So much in respect of the starting of the League and of the Going Concern in the Present. It remains for us to speak of the Going Concern in the Future. Viscount Grey has described the state of mind which will be required when we approach this great International enterprise: is there not something more precise to be said in that matter also?

I have expressed my belief that both Free Trade of the Laissez-faire type and Predatory Protection of the German type are principles of Empire, and that both make for War. Fortunately the younger Britains refused to accept the Free Trade of Manchester; they used the fiscal independence granted to them by the Motherland to pursue that economic ideal which was foreshadowed by the great American statesman, Alexander Hamilton— the ideal of the truly independent nation, balanced in all its development. This does