Page:The New Protectionism.djvu/143

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THE OPEN DOOR
119

business men, financiers, and traders, in the several nations, using the offices of their respective Governments to assist them in promoting these profitable business enterprises, that has underlain most of the friction in modern diplomacy and foreign policy, and has brought powerful nations so often into dangerous conflict. To prove this statement, one has only to name the countries which have been the recent danger-areas: Egypt, Morocco, Tripoli, Transvaal, Persia, Mexico, China, the Balkans. Though in every case other considerations, racial, political, dynastic, or religious, are also involved, sometimes more potent in the passions they evoke, the moving and directing influences have come from traders, financiers, and bondholders. Through the entanglements of Anglo-French political policy in Egypt runs the clear, determinant streak of bondholding interests. The kernel of the Moroccan trouble was the competition of the Mannesmann and the Schneider firms over the "richest iron ores in the world."

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