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HOW TO MEET TRADE AGGRESSION
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else than an intelligent seizure of legitimate business opportunities. What German firms have been doing, our firms also should have been doing, and, so far as we have been successful, have been doing. The notion that all this expanding German trade and finance have been the cat's-paw of the aggressive German State is baseless. The capitalists who rule German industry, trade, and finance, are out for profits, not for political aims, and their success would have been impossible on any other terms. Like business men in every other country, they get what use they can from the Government, in the way of education, transport, tariffs, and diplomatic pressure. But the suggestion that German traders, bankers, colonists, are merely advance agents of the German State is one of those impositions upon credulity which would not have been possible in any other atmosphere than that of war. There is no better illustration of this credulity than the easy acceptance by "the man in the street" of the familiar charge against Germans of