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Updated: May 15, 2025
The nature, reach and prescriptive force of this prospective coalescence through neutralisation may perhaps best be appreciated in the light of what has already come to pass, without design or mandatory guidance, in those lines of human interest where the national frontiers interpose no bar, or at least no decisive bar, whether by force of unconcern or through impotence.
So that exemption from these things by a comprehensive neutralisation of trade relations would immediately benefit all the nations concerned, in respect of their material well-being in times of peace. There is no exception and no abatement to be taken account of under this general statement, as is well known to all men who are conversant with these matters.
It should accordingly appear to be the first care of such a pacific league to reduce the sources of patriotic incitement to the practicable minimum. This can be done, in such measure as it can be done at all, by neutralisation of national pretensions.
But such neutralisation could not conceivably reach the Fatherland unless that nation were made over in the image of democracy, since the Imperial State is, by force of the terms, a warlike and unneutral power. This would seem to be the ostensibly concealed meaning of the allied governments in proclaiming that their aim is to break German militarism without doing harm to the German people.
Under neutralisation, colonies would cease to be "colonial possessions," being necessarily included under the general abrogation of commercial discriminations, and also necessarily exempt from special taxation or specially favorable tax rates. Colonies there still would be, though it is not easy to imagine what would be the meaning of a "German Colony" in such a case.
At the hands of this British commonwealth the new situation requires the putting away of the German Imperial establishment and the military caste; the reduction of the German peoples to a footing of unreserved democracy with sufficient guarantees against national trade discriminations; surrender of all British tutelage over outlying possessions, except what may go to guarantee their local autonomy; cancelment of all extra-territorial pretensions of the several nations entering into the league; neutralisation of the several national establishments, to comprise virtual disarmament, as well as cancelment of all restrictions on trade and of all national defense of extra-territorial pecuniary claims and interests on the part of individual citizens.
Such stipulation would, of course, cover all manner of trade discrimination, e.g., import, export and excise tariff, harbor and registry dues, subsidy, patent right, copyright, trade mark, tax exemption whether partial or exclusive, investment preferences at home and abroad, in short it would have to establish a thoroughgoing neutralisation of trade relations in the widest acceptation of the term, and to apply in perpetuity.
The southern strip of coast from the frontier of the Italian district of Valona as far as Cape Stiloa to be subject to neutralisation.
Yet it is plain that the peace will be secure in direct proportion to the measure in which national discrimination and prestige are allowed to pass into nothingness and be forgot. By so much as it might amount to, such neutralisation of outstanding interests between these pacific nations should bring on a degree of coalescence of these nationalities.
Of these conditions precedent, the chief and foremost, without which any other favorable circumstances are comparatively idle, is a considerable degree of neutralisation, extending to virtually all national interests and pretensions, but more particularly to all material and commercial interests of the federated peoples; and, indispensably and especially, such neutralisation would have to extend to the nations from whom aggression is now apprehended, as, e.g., the German people.
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