Munich
superfluous millions year by year, and thus to keep the nation on a self-sustaining basis, or
4. Industry and commerce could work for foreign consumption, and a living could be taken from the profits.
In other words: either a territorial or a colonial and commercial policy.
Both roads were looked at from various angles, discussed, advocated and opposed, until at last the second was definitely followed.
The sounder way would, it is true, have been the first one.
The acquisition of new land for transplantation of the overflowing population has countless advantages, particularly if we look not to the present but to the future.
The mere possibility of preserving a healthy peasant class as the cornerstone of the whole nation can never be sufficiently prized. Many of our present troubles result altogether from the unsound relation between country and city people. A solid nucleus of small and medium-scale peasant farmers has always been the best protection against such social ills as affect us today. This is, furthermore, the only solution which allows a nation to find its daily bread through the cycle of domestic economy. Industry and commerce then recede from their unhealthy position of leadership, and take their places in the general scheme of a national balanced consumption economy. Thus they are no longer the basis of the nation’s livelihood, but only auxiliary to it. By confining themselves to the role of a balance between home production and consumption in every field, they make the people’s whole livelihood more or less independent of foreign countries, or in other words they help to assure the freedom of the state and the independence of the nation, particularly in time of stress.
But it must be said that a territorial policy of this sort cannot be carried out in a place like the Cameroons, but, in these days, almost without exception only in Europe. We must take a cool, calm stand upon the position that it surely cannot be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much of
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