There is a town in Prussia that finished payment only twenty years ago on the indemnity Napoleon exacted from it.
Can a country afford to develop an industrial system dependent upon an outside world and then suddenly find the outside world closed by tariff barriers?
When an American ambassador protested against Bismarck's discriminatory treatment of American pork, the great chancellor asked, "What have you to talk with?
You have no army or navy." "No," said the American ambassador, "but we have the ability to build them as big as anybody.
Do you wish to tempt us ?" "No," said the German chancellor, "and your goods shall not be discriminated against." Dr.Dernburg has given the key to the German colonial military, tariff, and financial policy.

German unity in tariffs and transportation has made German prosperity, and Dr.Dernburg, her former colonial secretary and now in New York, says the mouth of the Rhine and the channel ports must be free to Germany and that Belgium must come into tariff and transportation union with Germany.

Belgium is being taxed, tariffed, pounded, and impounded into the German empire.
There is some difference in size between Belgium and Russia, but no difference in principle with respect to their German relations.
"World power or downfall," Bernhardi put it..