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BRITONS V. GERMANS IN CHINA
we neglect our business in favour of sport, and how our manufacturers refuse to make goods to suit native tastes. All this has been repeated ad nauseam, and such reports are so assiduously circulated, and read by nearly everyone, that we come to believe them of ourselves. The more so as there is a wee grain of truth in them all. Our merchants and manufacturers are not all they should be, and perhaps never will attain to the dignity of a company of super-merchants, all conducting their trade by super-methods which only Mr. H. G. Wells could describe. But in point of fact the Germans have actually faults also, many of them very much accentuated, and, if they have some superior virtues to the British, the British have other virtues which fully compensate any failings in other respects. If results are anything to go by, we have made a much better exhibition of com-
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BRITONS V. GERMANS IN CHINA 45
mercial enterprise in China than they have done. True it is we have been established there longer, but a hunt through directories. shows that the Germans were fairly numerous thirty years ago, and that they have attained their present position not so much. at the expense of British traders, as of other nationalities, the French in particular. It is impossible not to be sarcastic as one reads the frequent reports all running down our own merchants. We are a lazy, un- enterprising, sport-loving lot of old fashioned dummies, but few at home realise that we have a trade in China millions ahead of the nearest European competing nation. We control big railways, and big shipping en- terprises. We have bigger dockyards, bigger advertising schemes, and a larger number of merchants and employees than any other European nation can boast of in China. We have undeniably the best
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