The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE WATER MERCHANT

“I’ll tell you what I think of Foreign Aid,” said the Saint, thoughtfully twisting the newspaper into the semblance of a short rope. “I think that if the Commies had assigned their best brains to inventing a gimmick that’d bleed America like a built-in leak in the economy, they couldn’t have come up with anything cleverer.”

“I don’t know about that,” Howard Mayne said. “But—”

“It saddles the poor squirming US taxpayer with an annual bill of buttons of dollars, for which he gets nothing but jobs for the gaggle of bureaucrats who administer it.”

“Perhaps, but—”

“The more advanced countries simply hate him a bit more, down inside, the way all proud people who are down on their luck react to being charity cases. The more backward ones simply insist more loudly that there must be no strings attached—which means that their bureaucrats want no check on how much of the gravy they can siphon off into their own pockets, while they personally take all the credit for what little trickles through to the populace, which is probably still out throwing rotten eggs at American ambassadors.”

“You’d better not let any Daily Worker correspondent hear you. He’d discover that you were an imperialist, colonialist—”

“I damn well am an imperialist colonialist,” Simon Templar agreed, warming to his subject. “I think the old British Empire, on the whole, was one of the best things this world has ever known. The good old colonialist went out into the wilderness and tamed a lot of unsanitary savages, brought them down out of trees or up out of mud huts, taught them to wash themselves and stop eating their elderly relatives for dinner, and with a few exceptions left them a hell of a lot better off than they would have made themselves in another three centuries, just in exchange for exploiting some natural resources that the benighted heathen didn’t know what to do with anyhow. So all they get for it is a lot of abuse, mostly from characters who wouldn’t know how to spell the word if it wasn’t for the education the wicked imperialists crammed into them. I think it’s an everlasting pity that more Englishmen didn’t have the guts to stand up and trumpet the facts, instead of being hustled into dropping their colonies like naughty boys caught with a fistful of stolen candy—by a lot of bloody-handed Russians, and sanctimonious Americans firmly settled in one of the biggest countries ever swiped from its aborigines.”

“You may be right,” Mayne said placatingly. “But I was talking about a matter of Domestic Aid. Just because I mentioned that there was some phony-sounding Arab in the background shouldn’t get us off on all these tangents.”

With his pleasantly ugly face and competent air, he looked like the very personification of the idealized detective familiar to every television watcher, and the fact that he was not playing such a part every week for a network sponsor was a commentary on the unpredictable hazards of acting as a profession rather than on his personal talent.

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