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.