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IMPERIALISM

manufacturer and the trader, is a source of very great profit to the investor."

The annual revenue which Great Britain receives from all its foreign and colonial trade, export and import, is estimated by Giffen, the statistician, at £18,000,000 sterling for 1899, calculating an average revenue of 2.5 per cent. on the total sum of £800,000,000 business.

However important this amount may be, it is not enough to explain the aggressive imperialism of Great Britain. This is explained by the 90 to 100 million pounds sterling in revenue drawn from capital "invested" in revenue drawn in the shape of interest by bondholders.

The revenue of the British bondholders is five times greater than that from the foreign trade of the greatest trading country in the world. Such is the essence of imperialism and imperialist parasitism.

And so the notion of a "Bondholder State" (Rentnerstaat) or of a moneylending State is passing into current use in economic literature dealing with imperialism. The world has fallen apart into a handful of moneylending States and a wast majority of debtor-States.

"Amongst investments abroad," says Schulze-Gaevernitz, "first rank must be assigned to those settled upon countries which are allied or politically dependent: Britain gives loans to Egypt, Japan, China, South America. Her fleet plays the part of policeman in case of necessity. Britain's political power protects her from a revolt of her debtors."82 Sartorius von Waltershausen in his work on the State System of Investing Abroad, gives Holland as the model moneylending State,