German colony

“ Nothing emphasises more sharply the purely military character of Germany's African colonies than the fact that there are seven soldiers or officials to every German civilian. Dwelling in idleness, in one of the most trying climates in the world, the officials seem to take a malicious satisfaction in interfering with the civil population, thus driving the traders—who form the backbone of every colony—to take up their residence in English ports and so paralysing German trade. ”

“ She’s got a slice or two of Africa, populated chiefly by niggers, mosquitoes, and soldiers. There aren’t any colonists there! She’s got a few miscellaneous islands about as big as a Kansas kitchen garden and good for nothing but naval stations. She’s got a few square miles of China, good enough for trade but no good at all for settlement. And year after year she sees millions of the best people [Pg 157] the Lord made—I’m part German myself and I know—pouring into the United States and into Brazil just because they haven’t got any German colony to go to. Don’t you know it gravels the Kaiser? ”

“ The German system, however, was not likely to appeal to such spirits of independence as the Boers, [Pg 78] especially when the Germans meted out to those Boers whom they employed as transport-riders during the Herero campaign, the same treatment as to the natives, and in some cases had Boers tied up to wagon wheels and flogged for minor offences.
Taken in all, the Colony is one the development of which has been carried on on strategical rather than commercial lines ”

“ About 2 o’clock we rode out of the German colony of Jaffa, which has bought the property formerly held by the American colony from Maine. The Germans are prospering, and promise well for the future. I was told that the Americans 375might have prospered, if their affairs had been well managed, but that their leader was about the worst head that could have been chosen. Only four, I believe, of the American colonists remain there, three women and one man. ”

“ These natives; when taken away from their homes; frequently die of home-sickness.
Let them send out from Europe a batch of German girls, who will find eager husbands awaiting them; and so people this colony with a white race. A simple; homely bourgeois German girl would here find herself a person of importance. You cannot people a colony without women; and they ought to be white women.
A deluded band of people—men and women—set out from Germany to live here in this colony “the simple life,” that is; to discard all raiment, as the natives do; and live in the sun. ”

“ But wherever in the world German travellers have gone, wherever German traders have settled, wherever the German Government has thought of working for a site for a colony, everywhere they have met British influence, British trade, the British flag. ”

“ These arguments apparently satisfied the Centre and the National Liberals, but the Social Democrats urged that the Colonies were merely a burden, and that the sooner they could be got rid of the better, as they were useless as homes for white men and contained hardly 25,000 whites altogether. The increase of their trade was only 31⁄2 per cent. of the total of that of German trade, and was less than Germany's trade with Cape Colony and with England's Crown Colonies ”

“ Wherever there was a tiny bit of land left, there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives objected, they were killed. In most cases they did not object, and were allowed to live peacefully, provided they did not interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines or the gold mines or the rubber plantations, and they derived many benefits from the foreign occupation. ”

“ This is a colony of twenty-five families, founded in 1788: the schoolmaster, who was also the minister, received them in a brotherly manner. It was here that their mission properly commenced. From this place a succession of German colonies extend in a south-easterly direction to the Sea of Azov. The villages are all built on the same pattern, being formed of one straight street of neat houses on both sides, adorned with trees in front and gardens behind. The German colonists consist principally of Mennonites and Lutherans. The former are the most numerous and thriving ”

“ Germany's conception of the idea of Colonies, therefore, was to build up overseas a new Germany composed of daughter states, which would remain essentially German and be the means of keeping her men at home in remunerative employment by providing raw material for the development of her industries. ”

“ Individual settlers are not encouraged to emigrate, but the plantations, ranches, etc., whence Germany drew her supplies of raw material such as cotton, rubber, wool, etc., are developed by [Pg 32] chartered companies and trading firms, and the so-called settlers are the managers of these.
Independent German farmers in her Colonies are few and far between, and the settlements which were to be centres of German kultur have not eventuated. A new Germany has not been created oversea. ”

“ He goes on to recommend that Germany ought "at any price," in order to forestall England, to get possession of points on both the west and east coasts of Africa, where factories could be established, branches of which, properly fortified, could be gradually pushed farther and farther inland and so by degrees form a wide network of German settlements. ”

“ The Colonies cried out for European enterprise and European capital, but they did not want individual settlers.
Under British rule the German has proved a most desirable Colonist, but he has never thriven under his own Colonial administration.
He is by nature extremely assimilative, and in our Colonies he prospers, not only competing with but outstripping the British trader owing to the employment of undercutting methods which do not [Pg 33] so readily occur to the British mind, hampered as it usually is by a sense of fair play. ”

“ Let me here say a word on the subject of colonial policy, on which I may perhaps be allowed to speak with a certain amount of authority after extended travel in the farthest corners of Africa, and from an intimate, personal knowledge of German as well as English and French colonies. Germany has less colonial territory than the older colonists, it is true. It is also true that the German struggle for the most widespread, the most intensive and lucrative employment of the energies and capabilities of our highly developed commercial land is justified. ”

“ History serves to show that to annex territory carrying a considerable homogeneous and hostile population is seldom a success, but since the German Colonies are so sparsely settled—partly because her bureaucratic methods discourage immigration, and partly because she has no difficulty in absorbing her surplus population at home—this argument does not apply here. ”

“ Roughly, the German Colonial Empire is five times as big as Germany, with a population of about 14,000,000 natives; and the question of German Colonial policy is a question of native policy.
It is in Germany's interest that the natives should be as numerous as possible, for it is their labour, intelligence, and industry that makes the Colonial Empire useful and necessary to Germany. ”

“ In the year 1882 the German Colonisation Society was started, with the object of acquiring Colonies oversea and the establishment of a navy and mercantile marine to form the link binding the isolated territories to the motherland.
[Pg 21]
The society was formed by merchants and traders with the end in view of extending trade; but to the militarist section the idea of Imperial expansion presented itself, and to that party the Colonies appealed rather from a strategical than a commercial standpoint. ”

“ Although the partition of Africa gave the German Empire nearly one million square miles and an obvious opening for colonization and power, the inexperience and ineptitude of German officials in Colonial government, the dislike, also, of Germans for emigration and the fact that the movement of settlers abroad steadily decreased in late years, tended to prevent, on the Continent, an expansion which would have been assured under British colonization and business effort. ”

“ There are seven hundred German colonists, all told, in the German colonies, and each of them costs the German tax-payer little short of eight hundred a year. How many of them are in the English colonies? And what's the reason? Why, they want to have the institutions of the Fatherland ready-made in five minutes. They need the colonies made before they can prosper in it. The French are better, but they are spoilt by officialdom. The Englishman just adapts himself to the conditions, and sets to work to adapt the conditions to himself too. ”

“ We must have real Colonies, where German emigrants can settle and spread the national ideals of the Fatherland, and we must have a fleet and coaling stations to keep together the Colonies which we are bound to acquire. ”

“ In the German Colonies a set-back to development has been the fact that they have never realised the importance of respecting local manners and customs, but the home machinery has been applied in every particular to conditions wholly dissimilar and unsuitable. ”

“ These rich lands afforded to their new masters useful supplies of raw materials, which were capable of almost indefinite expansion. They included, in East and South-West Africa, areas well suited for white settlement; but German emigrants, despite every encouragement, refused to settle in them. An elaborately scientific system of administration, such as might be expected from the German bureaucracy, was devised for the colonies; officials and soldiers have from the beginning formed a larger proportion of their white population than in any other European possessions. ”

“ In the northerly portion, suitable for agriculture, this was carried on by natives; but their land was confiscated by the Germans, and, as Dr Bönn stated in a reading upon the Colony, "the framework of society is European; very little land is in the hands of natives." ”

“ It applies clearly [to those] colonial claims which have been created by the war. That means the German colonies and any other colonies which may come under international consideration as a result of the war. The stipulation is that in the case of the German colonies the title is to be determined after the conclusion of the war by "impartial adjustment" based on certain principles. These are of two kinds: (1) "equitable" claims; (2) the interests of the populations concerned. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We shall do otherwise than the Spaniards, who made the new world into a papistic slaughter-house; we shall do otherwise than the English, who convert their colonies into huge shops for their own individual profit. Our colonies shall be truly German, and from sunrise to sunset we shall contemplate a beautiful, free Germany, inhabited, as in the mother country, by a free people. ”

“ Good colonists as they are under us or America, they have not yet—here, at least—learnt how to colonise for themselves.
Personally, no one ever resented or resents the stupidity of our Home Government more in ever making it possible for any Foreign Power to be here at all than I do, as I can foresee the trouble that will arise in the future should it long remain a German possession; but, since they are here, and legitimately here, I feel a real interest in their progress and much sympathy with their present aims and endeavours to develop this land. ”

“ Anyone who knows English colonies knows that the British Government, wherever it has been possible to do so politically, that is, in all her colonies which are already properly organised and firmly established as British, has always met in a most generous and sympathetic way German, and indeed any foreign, trade or other enterprises. ”

“ The opening of 1891 saw Germany with ample territory oversea to accommodate surplus population; while we, secure in our own strength, with amused tolerance, allowed her to climb to "her place in the sun."
It was not the intention of Germany, however, to use the Colonies as dumping grounds, nor to encourage a policy of emigration—but rather to exploit them as supports for home industry.
Many German industries depend upon foreign countries for the import of a continual supply of raw material which cannot be produced in Germany; while part of their necessaries are even obtained from abroad. ”

“ That its application becomes more intense in dealing with inferior races, where the restraints of civilisation do not exist, will surprise no one. In the Pacific Islands, as in their African Colonies, the same tale is told. Their native population would rejoice to exchange German for British rule. ”

“ The society received enthusiastic support, and, indeed, all Germany began to look to Colonies which were to be purely German; and with this enlarged horizon, policy settled down to the acquisition of oversea territory, the ambition being naturally accompanied by an aspiration towards a powerful navy, necessary, ostensibly, to keep communications open. ”