I.

The present movement in Germany towards colonial expansion promises to set in its right place the part played by her people in the settlement of the earth. This has been hitherto under-estimated, as Germany has established no colonies of her own, and up to the present century her colonial activity has been intermittent. But the colonizing instinct has, since the earliest times, been innate in the German character. For centuries the history of civilization in North Germany is the history of the gradual conquest of the Eastern Provinces from the Wends, and of the patient reclamation of the soil. By their superior persistence and industry the Teutonic settlers pushed back in turn the various Sclavic populations whose irruptions had once thrust them to the west. Under different conditions the struggle continues at the present day, and German thrift and discipline even now gain ground in the Baltic provinces of Russia. This expansion of Germany to the east was followed by the rise of the great Hanseatic commerce. Nor can there be much doubt that, if the towns of the Hansa had retained their commercial pre-eminence, and if the steady increase of German population had been left unhindered, German enterprize in due time would have claimed its share in the allotment of the New World. But at the decisive epoch the heaviest calamity she ever experienced, and one that influenced the whole of her succeeding history and retarded her development, fell upon Germany.

The religious troubles of the sixteenth century drew to a head in the great religious war. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed, and the storm which had raged through the length and breadth of the land for nearly thirty years, was at last spent, Germany was left desolate and exhausted. Her fields lay untilled, her forests had been wasted with fire, her commerce dislocated, while something like two-thirds of her population had perished. So appalling did the want of men and labor seem at the time that even the Catholic Church, according to some historians, sanctioned marriage among its priests. From that time to the beginning of this century, Germany practically retires from the field of colonial and commercial activity; for, whatever may be the last motives which impel the emigrant to leave his home, the necessary condition of successful colonization in the modern world is the presence of a redundant population at home. Moreover, the policy of the petty Governments into which the country was broken up, was now uniformly directed to attracting and then restricting labor. This was absolutely necessary in the first place for the actual cultivation of the soil. In 1768 the humanitarian Emperor, Joseph II., issued a warning to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire against allowing the migration of their subjects for this reason. With the rise of political ambitions an additional motive was supplied. In Prussia and elsewhere the serfs contributed exclusively the rank and file of the armies, which were officered by the nobility, while the commercial classes were exempted from military service.

After a long interval German population began to recover itself in the last century. But the process was gradual, and it received a heavy blow from the Seven Years’ War, and again from the protracted Napoleonic struggle. During the eighteenth century the only considerable emigration was Catharine the Second’s great importation of German peasants into Southern Russia. And in connection with this appears for the first time that deep-rooted aversion to paying the blood-tax of conscription, which became an article of faith with the Menonite sect, and removed it wholesale from the Dantzig region.

II.

After the Treaty of Paris the enormous reproductive vigor of the German race soon reasserted itself, and the surplus population began to swarm off in ever-larger numbers. The stream of emigration, which had begun to dribble into New York before the close of last century, where the son of a Baden butcher had already established the future fortunes of the Astors, assumed its present volume and importance about 1820. Since that time it has kept roughly proportionate to the growth of population, increasing temporarily when wars and rumors of war have been in the air, and subsiding, as they disappeared, to its normal limits. Taking the last sixty years from 1822, the total number of German immigrants into North America was something over three millions, and the last decade has contributed a million alone. They have increased and multiplied in the land of their adoption, and the United States contain to-day some seven million citizens in all of German origin, who, according to many observers, are destined to become the predominant element in the new community. It has certainly pervaded the whole organization of society. German names are to be found among the leading merchants, the great financiers, and, to a minor extent, among the politicians, and if they occur less frequently than might be expected, it must be remembered that a regular process of converting German into English names, according to their signification, was instituted in the New York of last century.

The German settler, as a rule, makes a less enterprising pioneer than the British. He is averse to giving hostages to fortune, and trusts rather to patient industry along the beaten tracks. But where the English or Scotch American has pushed to the West or founded a new mining-camp, the less adventurous Teuton follows, and, with his genius for plodding industry, not unfrequently reaps the fruits of the others’ daring. Accordingly the mass of the German Americans may be found within the more settled Eastern and Central States. A large proportion go to recruit the territorial democracy, and an almost equally large number find employment in the mines, on roads and railways, and in the engineering sheds. The female immigrants do something to supply the general want of domestic servants, and the ubiquitous German Kellner is almost as well known in New York as in Dresden or Vienna. A small residue, again, which has carried into the New World the impracticable ideas and habits which made residence in the Fatherland impossible, sink into the discontented urban populations among which Socialistic ideas are germinating freely.

Vast as their powers of assimilation are, the United States, however, do not absorb all the redundant population of Germany. Though no longer imported and settled in large bodies by improving Empresses as an example of thrift, the peasants still find their way across the Russian frontier. The Czar now counts nearly three quarters of a million subjects of German origin, chiefly of the Bauer class, and they supply the best agricultural labor in his dominions. But, unlike their brethren in the more congenial atmosphere of America, they refuse to throw off their Deutschthum, and remain in unyielding opposition to their unsympathetic environment

Among the steppes of New Russia, or along the flat banks of the shallow Volga, the traveller will come upon more than one cluster of villages with high-pitched roofs, bearing the familiar names of Weimar, Strasburg, Mannheim, &c. which witness to the existence of a secret Heimweh, Æternum sub pectore volnus. Considerable agricultural colonies have similarly grown up unnoticed in South America. In Rio Grande do Sul and the adjacent provinces, German settlers have rendered their territory the garden of Brazil; have given the landscape a new character with their Lutheran churches, and are wealthy and numerous enough to support five German newspapers.

Far away, also, under less clement skies, their perseverance has reclaimed a prosperous domain amid the swamps of the Dobrudscha. The Menonite settlement which lately passed under the Roumanian Government numbers 100,000 souls. The beginnings of smaller settlements, again, are noticeable in Syria and Thessaly, intent on bringing under cultivation long-desolate tracts.

In England and in other populous countries the position of the German settler is naturally different. The immigration into England began with the political refugees of 1848, and developed its present character and proportions much later. At this moment the German element in England is probably under-estimated at 250,000. It is concentrated in the large towns. The metropolis alone is credited with 100,000 German adults, and its German population suffices to support four newspapers, while a daily average importation of 12,500 journals keep it in touch with the Fatherland. Manchester and Liverpool can boast another 30,000 between them, engaged in commerce and finance. Indeed, according to a common saying, half the members of the Stock Exchange are now Germans, and this very exaggeration indicates the position they have acquired in the world of Capel Court. The majority, however, are rather to be found in the lower walks of commercial life.

The German clerk has become a conspicuous feature in the city, and tends to bring down still lower the scanty salaries of the class to which he belongs. There are eating-houses in the neighborhood of Mark Lane where the mid-day visitor might fancy himself transported into Hamburg, so general are the guttural interjections around him. Germans throng, again, into several industries, while in the East-end there is a large but by no means prosperous body of tailors, whom Professor Bryce found it prudent, for electoral purposes, to address in their own tongue.

Even into France the intruding German has found his way. He has engrossed several branches of trade into his hands, has come to be the principal maker of the elegant articles du Paris, and from time to time provokes an outburst of indignant chauvinism. According to consular reports, exclusive of citizens of German descent, the Republic shelters and maintains 80,000 subjects of the Hohenzollerns. His presence is also felt in Italy, Hungary, and the Austrian Slav States. The same qualities win him a foothold everywhere; he works harder, lives cheaper, and asks less than the native. He threatens, indeed, in these respects, to become to other Europeans what the Chinese have become to the American.

Not content with the necessarily rough estimates of the number of German-descended settlers abroad, the Imperial Government last year set on foot a careful statistical inquiry into the number of expatriated German-born subjects. The returns are as yet incomplete, and do not embrace Russia or Asia. But they are significant as showing the direction this vast emigration takes. Out of nearly two and a half millions of German-born subjects in other lands, America contains 1,900,000, France and Switzerland respectively about 80,000, and England 40,000.

It could hardly be expected that Germany, animated by a proud consciousness of her newly-won national existence, should look upon this expatriation of her children with equanimity. There are many things in the position of their brethren abroad which are only too galling to the pride of the arbiters of Europe. Hardest of all, perhaps, for the German patriot to bear is the spectacle of his countrymen easily surrendering their Deutschthum, putting on another nationality like a cloak, and becoming oblivious of the common home. According to Hartmann’s dismal lamentations, the German emigrant is distinguished above all others by the ease with which he effects this change.

Certainly in America and Australia his complaint holds good. The vulgar system of transforming German into English names has already been remarked, and in the second generation the immigrant is entirely American, ostentatiously affecting to “schbick de Inglisch only,” Elsewhere the process of transition does not go on so readily. In Russia the German settler exemplifies the fundamental antagonism of Slav and Teuton, and retains a sense of his origin and inherent superiority among his more indolent neighbors. But in Russia the Bauer is contributing to the wealth, not only of a rival, but perhaps of a hostile nationality. He labors again, even in Brazil, under religious and civil disabilities; in the Dobrudscha the German villages were harried by Circassians in the late war, and now the Roumanian Government seeks to plant its own husbandmen on the lands reclaimed by German industry. In other European countries the emigrant is forced to win a difficult footing by undertaking the most toilsome and unremunerative labor. He is, indeed, reduced into being a hewer of wood and drawer of water for alien peoples.

Apart from these sentimental motives there are urgent political and economical reasons why the demand for a greater Germany, for a German exit to carry off this surplus population, should now be made. A military empire depends upon its supply of recruits, and according to Bismarck’s somewhat paradoxical theory, the emigrants are drawn from among the most capable and energetic citizens. This continual drain of military strength can hardly be looked upon without apprehension.

Again the economical loss to Germany by this outgoing of productive labor is tremendous. It has been calculated at an annual sum of £15,000,000, and for the last fifty years to amount to a capital sum of £700,000,000. These figures are probably pitched too high, but the substantial fact remains the same.

III.

At the same time the vital necessity of relieving Germany by an annual Auswanderung is now fully recognized. The necessity becomes daily more urgent. In Germany the birth-rate per mille has advanced to 38; in Great Britain it stands at 35, giving a yearly increase in population for the two countries of 600,000 and 400,000 respectively. Hence every walk of life is congested in the Empire, and in the lower strata of society the struggle for existence has become almost internecine. The artizans have no accumulated resources to fall back upon as in England, and the pressure of the agricultural class upon the soil, for all its thrift and economy, is fearfully severe. The struggle tells chiefly, of course, upon life in its weaker stages, and the returns of infant mortality indicate how desperate it has become, how shrunken is the margin between production and consumption, and what the terrible remedy is which Nature is constrained to supply. In populous tracts in the heart of the Empire the rate of infant mortality reaches 40, and even 45, per mille. In corresponding English districts it does not rise above 20.

For the last twenty-five years individual thinkers have proclaimed the importance of organizing German colonies to carry off this surplus population regularly, of preventing its absorption into foreign peoples, and of utilizing it for the common weal. For years their exhortations remained like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The country was engaged in consolidating its national existence; a superficial glance revealed the fact that the more desirable spaces of the earth’s surface were filled up, and the official classes looked upon the proposal askance. Proud of the great work its industry and intelligence had already achieved, the Beamtenstand was confident of its ability to solve the newer problems by re-adjusting the relations of labor and capital, and by modifying the social organization.

The task has proved more formidable than was anticipated, and the attitude of the Socialists has disabused the bureaucracy of its confidence. In opposition even to the enticing schemes of the Iron Chancellor they show themselves determined to insist on their own inadmissible scheme of social re-construction. Nor do they manifest more favor towards the colonial panacea; some of their leaders, indeed, have denounced it in the bitterest terms, both as impracticable and as an ignis fatuus likely to lead the nation astray from the true path of salvation. On the other hand, the commercial classes are warm in its support, and German conservatism generally hopes for the effect which a Greater Germany may possibly exercise in diverting the imagination of the working classes from internal Utopias.

But the difficulties in the way of establishing transmarine agricultural colonies, and this is the central aim of German aspirations, are very great. Germany has to make up the lee-way of two centuries, to recover the start which England obtained while she was torn and exhausted by recurring war. The suitable zones of the world are apparently already occupied, and neither the acquisition of islands in the Pacific, nor placing barren coasts or fever-swamps in Africa under the Imperial Ægis, will serve her purpose. Popular aspirations, indeed, point to a South African Empire, incorporating the Transvaal and Cape Colony at our expense, and influential papers do not hesitate to air these aspirations. But neither these suggestions nor the more practicable demand for a Germany in South America have yet received the imprimatur of responsible politicians.

IV.

A like necessity for making up lost lee-way dominates the simultaneous movement towards commercial extension. Germany entered the commercial arena long after England had covered the globe with the network of her shipping routes and her credit system. To reduce the advantage gained, and to bring up their own lines to a level, a subvention is to be paid out of the national revenues. An examination of the four subsidized lines originally proposed, to China, Australia, Bombay, and South Africa, shows that they were meant to compete directly with existing English routes. In the same way the projected Transmarine Bank is to contend with the ubiquitous English banking and credit organization, of which the Germans are forced to avail themselves. Indeed, the Cologne Gazette has lately computed that by the use of English carrying ships, and by the payment of bank commissions, &c., Germany contributes a tax of £25,000 a day to the wealth of this country.

Handicapped, however, as German commerce has been, it has lately made great strides over-seas, thanks to its distinguishing qualities of thrift and industry. German competition is felt severely in the Far East, and has cut down profits at Hongkong to a minimum. And though the bulk of the foreign trade of China remains with the English, the coasting trade is rapidly passing into German hands. In South America they have secured a still larger share of her trade; their agents are active in the Pacific; and, besides the new territory of LÜderitzland, more than sixty factories have recently been established along the African coast, from Sierra Leone to Ambriz, while German influence had apparently gained a temporary advantage in Zanzibar. The demand for new markets is the more urgent now in Germany because the largest of her previous markets, Russia, is being closed against her. Not content with having sheltered themselves already behind an almost prohibitive tariff, the Moscow manufacturers, alarmed at the success with which their German rivals have transferred their plant into Russian Poland, in spite of the difficulties and expense, now clamor for a Customs line to be drawn between the Polish provinces and inner Russia.

The loud demand for new markets is not, however, really so urgent, or sustained by such pressing causes, as the cry for colonial settlements. It may be doubted whether Germany’s penurious soil possesses in itself sufficient mineral and other resources ever to allow her to contend with this country as the great manufacturer of the raw products of the world.

It is rather England who must seek new outlets for her commerce, as her old markets are exhausted or shared among new competitors, while the amount of human energy she supplies, and its more than proportionate productiveness, steadily increase, owing to acquired skill and improved machinery. Germany’s first need, on the other hand, is for habitable and agricultural colonies, where her surplus population may be planted, and may not be lost to her. There is, therefore, no immediate cause of hostile rivalry; and German expansion, with its orderly and commercial instinct, may be regarded as a valuable influence in the spread of civilization.

V.

In discussing German movements, however, it is impossible, at the present time, to omit reckoning with the views of the great statesman who controls her destinies. Prince Bismarck has been variously represented as reluctantly putting himself at the head of a colonial agitation which he really deprecates, and as using it merely in order to discomfit domestic opponents, or to make foreign Governments feel his weight abroad. No doubt these last two reasons have had some effect in shaping the Chancellor’s actual policy. But Prince Bismarck appears to have needed no prompting for appreciating the necessity of colonial expansion, and to have given it his serious reflection long before the present Colonization Society met at Eisenach. In the days of the North German Confederacy, the rising Minister lent all his influence to the proposals of the firm of Godeffroys Bros. for the annexation of the Samoa group. A scheme was drawn up, dividing the land among military settlers, grants of arms were made from the Royal Arsenals, and the Hertha the first continental iron-clad which steamed through the Suez Canal, was despatched to give a vigorous support. Before the last arrangements, however, were completed, the Franco-German war intervened, with the internal consolidation and the diplomatic struggles which succeeded it.

But Prince Bismarck had not abandoned his early ideas; he was waiting till the time was ripe. In 1875 he made a tentative effort, without success, to wring a guarantee from the Reichstag for a new South Sea Company. Next year he was pressed to give his support to a proposed railway from Pretoria to the sea. He refused, but in private made the following significant statement to the intermediate agent:—

“The colonial question is one I have studied for years. I am convinced Germany cannot go on for ever without colonies, but as yet I fail to perceive deep traces of such a movement in the country.” Those deep traces have now been revealed, and it remains to be seen whether the Iron Chancellor will not be able, in spite of the apparently insuperable objects in his way, to give practical effect to the aspirations of the German nation, and to his own earnest conviction.—National Review.