276 ENGLISH SAGA

more important to him their political control became. The
forces of diplomacy and those grimmer forces that give weight
to diplomacy, were inevitably marshalled in defence of the
economic interests he created. There were successive crises
which marked the clash of such forces, when one great Power
in search of markets for goods or loans encountered another in
the same field: Fashoda, Venezuela, Agadir. At each of these
there was ominous talk of war, and an unloosing of popular
national and racial feelings which had nothing to do with
economics but which, deep-rooted in human hearts, could only
too easily be aroused by the instruments of mass-suggestion.
And these, unconsciously but inevitably, tended to fall under
the control of the contending financial interests.

For when there was no more unoccupied land to seize or
spheres of financial interest to penetrate, the great Powers began
to covet each other's colonial possessions and economic fields.
It was inevitable that those late starters in the twin race of
colonial expansion and loan-mongering who had acquired the
least should feel aggrieved. They thought of themselves as
"have-not" Powers denied a "proper place in the sun.'* Germany,
who, though second to none either in commercial or military
pushfulness, had on account of her comparative newness obtained
a rather bleak share of colonial plunder, made a special point
of this.

The more ambitious of her people particularly resented the
size of the British Empire. A young Englishman of education
lacking an outlet in his overcrowded country could look
for honourable and remunerative employment under his own
flag and laws in one or other of his country's colonies. Germany,
with half again Britain's population and apparently twice her
energy and ambition, was less happily circumstanced: her.
hastily acquired colonies were confined mainly to tropical or
semi-tropical deserts and forests in Africa and a few islands in
the Pacific. She had nothing to offer the eager and pushing
alumni of her overcrowded universities comparable in oppor-
tunity to the career afforded by the I.C.S. or the Sudan Civil.
And, as Germany was finding, one of the inevitable concomitants
of capitalist enterprise is the creation of large numbers of
bourgeois youth demanding university education and some out-
let for their talents more remunerative than handiwork and
more honourable than trade. They found it inevitably in a