German settlement

“ In many cases the peasants have been provided with funds to carry on their agricultural operations. In Western Prussia 39 estates with about 14,000 inhabitants have passed into German hands. [118] Often it has been impossible to induce peasants from other parts of Germany to settle in the Polish provinces, and the state has resorted to the importation of German peasants from the old German settlements in Russia, Galicia and Bosnia.
German colonization in Polish provinces has been accompanied by increase and expansion of urban centers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This process has led to the present distribution of languages, which expresses a fossilization of German colonization in the east, and illustrates in a most striking way the penetration of peoples. Poland and part of Russia, Slavonic and Magyar territories, are interspersed with small German settlements, which are the more sparse and scattered the farther east they are located, the more continuous the nearer they lie to Germany. ”

“ Only, never again a withered Reichsland! (imperial territory.) From Calais to Antwerp, Flanders, Limburg, Brabant, to behind the line of the Meuse forts, Prussian! (German Princes no longer haggle, German tribes no longer envy one another;) the Southern triangle with Alsace and Lorraine—and Luxemburg, too, if it desires—is to be an independent federated State, intrusted to a Catholic noble house. Then Germany would know for what it shed its blood. ”

“ A Roman Empire with a long Baltic coast was something that had never been dreamed of in earlier days. If the extension of the German name was but the recovery of long lost{201} Teutonic lands, the extension to them of the Imperial name which had become identified with Germany was at least wholly new. ♦The Slavonic lands Germanized.♦ In all the lands now annexed, save in a few exceptional districts, German annexation meant German colonization, and the assimilation of the surviving inhabitants to the speech and manners of Germany. ”

“ An expression of deep seriousness lies like a mask on his powerful face. Is it not enough to be the Emperor of the German federation, with its four kingdoms, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg, its six grand duchies, its many duchies and electorates, its imperial territory, Alsace-Lorraine, and its three free towns, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bremen? Does he not rule over sixty-five million people, over 207 towns of more than 25,000 inhabitants, and seven of more than half a million, namely Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, Breslau, and Cologne? ”

“ Colonists were brought, specially from the Frisian lands, by whose means the Low-Dutch tongue was spread along the whole southern coast of the Baltic. German cities were founded. The marchlands grew into powerful German states. At last one of these marchlands, united with a German conquest still further cut off from the heart of the old German realm, has grown into a state which in our own days has become the Imperial power of Germany.
♦Internal geography of Germany.♦
The internal geography of the German kingdom is the greatest difficulty of such a work as the present. ”

“ Millions of Germans in Alsace-Lorraine, Bohemia, Poland, and East Prussia were transferred to alien domination; millions of others in German Austria were denied the right of self-determination in the form of union with Germany ”

“ Everyone knows with what infinite patience, vast expenditure of money and effort, and perfect indifference to justice or morality, the Prussian government has worked to fill its eastern provinces with Germans and to dispossess the Poles of a land which has been theirs for a thousand years. The chef d’oeuvre of this policy has been the work of the Imperial Colonization Commission, which in the last thirty years has spent over 500,000,000 marks in buying up property in the eastern provinces and settling German colonists upon it. ”

“ The analogy, if one can be set up in conditions so dissimilar, would lie not between Prussia and her Polish provinces, but between the German Empire and Alsace-Lorraine. What, then, would be the paramount object of Germany in her administration of an overseas Reichsland of such extraordinary geographical importance to her future as Ireland would be? ”

“ Enough has now been said to give some idea of the distracted condition of the Germanies in the eighteenth century and to explain why the Holy Roman Empire was an unimportant bond of union. Austria, traditionally the chief of the Germanies, was increasingly absorbed in her non-German possessions in Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. Prussia, the rising kingdom of the North, comprised a population in which Slavs constituted a large minority. Saxony was linked with Poland; Hanover, with Great Britain. Bavaria was a chronic ally of France. ”

“ The present population of the German Empire is almost exclusively Germanic, the exceptions being the Slavic Poles of Posen, Pomerellen, southeastern Prussia and eastern Silesia, the remnant of the Wends of Lusatia and the French element in the recently acquired Imperial lands of Alsace and Lorraine. ”

“ The longer the war lasted, and the greater the sacrifices that it imposed, the greater and the stronger also grew the general opinion of Germany that peace must be concluded solely in return for, over and above a large ransom, the cession of these two provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, which were regarded as German, and, above all, as a necessary rampart against France. ”

“ Still large parts of Germany were lost to the Empire no less than Italy and Burgundy. A considerable territory on the western and south-western frontier of Germany gradually fell away. Part of this territory has grown into independent states; part has been incorporated with the French kingdom. The Swiss Confederation has grown up on lands partly German, partly Burgundian, partly Italian, but of which the oldest and greatest part belonged to the German kingdom. ”

“ Whilst in the regions adjoining the Oder, and still farther off by the shores of the Baltic, the German race, proud of their recent conquest over the Sclaves, desired to improve themselves by union with Germany, a great Sclave population had arisen in the middle of the German states, the toughest and most stable of all that family: it was firmly incorporated in the Empire, and had long been under the influence of German culture. ”

“ Within the limits of Germany itself, there was, as we have seen, no united nationality. Even the consolidation of the smaller tribes under the names of Goths, Franks, Saxons and Alemanni, during the third century, was only the beginning of a new political development which was not continued upon German soil. With the exception of Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Ireland, Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and the Byzantine territory in Turkey, Greece and Italy, all Europe was under Germanic rule at the end of the Migration of the Races, in the year 570. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Would we comprehend the Germany of to-day, we must hold firmly in our minds an epitome of what it has been, and see vividly the devious path of its development through the ages.
The German nation is of ancient lineage, and indeed belongs to the royal line of human descent, the Aryan; its ancestral roots running back until lost in the heart of Asia, in the mists of antiquity.
The home of the Aryan race is shrouded in mystery, as are the impelling causes which sent those successive tides of humanity into Europe. ”

“ Good-bye, fair city of happy, ever happy, recollections. Bright, gabled Bruges, we shall not look upon thy like again.”
I will make extracts from my German Diary, as Germany in those days was still a land of kindly people whom we liked much before they became spoilt by the Prussianism only then beginning to assert itself over the civil population. The Rhine, too, was still unspoilt. That part of Germany was agricultural; not yet industrialised out of its charm. ”

“ Thus ignobly fell the noblest of the ancient Germans, the man whose patriotism saved the realm of the Teutonic tribes from becoming a province of the empire of Rome. Had not Hermann lived, the history of Europe might have pursued a different course, and the final downfall of the colossus of the south been long averted, Germany acting as its bulwark of defence instead of becoming the nursery of its foes. ”

“ Among the events of the thirteenth century, the wonderfully rapid colonization of the Sclave country east of the Elbe has never been sufficiently appreciated. In the course of one century a numerous body of German emigrants of all classes, almost as many as now go to America, spread themselves over a large tract of country, established hundreds of cities and villages, and united it for the most part firmly to Germany. ”

“ In our own day the whole coast, from the isle of Rügen to the head of the gulf of Bothnia, is in the possession of two powers, one German, one Slavonic. ♦German influence abiding.♦ But German influence abides beyond the bounds of German rule. Not only have Pomerania and Prussia become German in every sense, but Curland, Livland, and Esthland, under the dominion of Russia, are still spoken of as German provinces. ”

“ The German Empire, they say, can claim the territories of the old Germano-Roman Empire, i.e., not only the Bohemian lands and Austria in general, but also Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and parts of ltaly and France. ”

“ The occupation of Vienna or Berlin is more of a demonstrative character, whereas the occupation of Alsace-Lorraine, Poznan (Posen) and Prussian Silesia, Galicia, Moravia, Bohemia and of Croatia in the South has a great significance as a first step towards the organisation of Central Europe on anti-German lines.
The occupation of the Slav countries of Germany and Austria-Hungary is the end of Pan-German imperialism; Austria-Hungary is the weakest point of Germany, every weakening of Austria is a blow to Germanism. ”

“ There came a moment, as I have pointed out in an earlier page in this book, when the Prussian kingship and the electorate of Brandenburg coincided in one person. All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel, what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook. East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political fetish. Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story. ”

“ Since the days of Adolf of Holstein and Henry the Lion, a movement of German colonization, in which farmers from the Low Countries, merchants from Lübeck, and monks of the Cistercian Order all played their parts, had been spreading German influence from the Oder to the Vistula, from the Vistula to the Dwina—to Prague, to Gnesen, and even to Novgorod the Great. ”

“ Their territories were so small, and so scattered, their resources were so meagre and so precarious, that feudal independence meant to them but a limited, localised, and stunted career, and afforded them few guarantees of protection against the aggressions of their stronger neighbours. In such men there was no strong bias of self-interest to prevent their giving rein to the wholesome sentiment of love of fatherland which still survived in German breasts. ”

“ Even the population and wealth of the German towns have probably been exaggerated. Careful statistical investigation suggests that none of the cities of upper Germany had more than 20,000 inhabitants, and those which may have been of larger size, such as Cologne or Bremen or Lübeck, are of more importance in the commercial than in the political history of Germany. ”

“ The provisional government of this province was intrusted to a joint commission, presided over by an Englishman. Holstein was abandoned to its fate. The final downfall of all the ideals of the German Liberals was followed by a feeling of dejection in Germany akin to despair. The number of immigrants who left Germany to seek new homes in America and elsewhere rose abruptly to 113,000 persons. ”

“ Our sense of justice [!] may in future lead us not to desire what does not belong to us, but if we take we must also hold fast. In other words, hitherto foreign territory is not incorporated into Germany until German proprietorship is rooted in the soil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”