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.