THE GERMAN PERIL
German Imperialism and the Monroe doctrine--_Das Deutschtum_ and
Southern Brazil--What the Brazilians think about it.
The Teutonic invasion is troubling our Ibero-American writers. The
tutelary protection of the United States does not suffice to make
them forget the European peril; memories of the Holy Alliance, of
that crusade of religious absolutism and reconquest, are still lively
in Latin America.
Three great nations--England, France, Germany--aspired to establish
their supremacy oversea in a lasting manner. England, a colonising
power in all parts of the world, thought to rule at Buenos-Ayres; the
defence of that Spanish city by the Viceroy Liniers was, says Onésime
Reclus, the Latin revenge for the taking of Quebec. France attacked
Mexico, and forced a monarch upon her; England and a French monarch
sent expeditions against the nationalist dictator Rosas, and Lord
Salisbury, in a diplomatic duel with the North American Secretary of
State, Mr. Olney, attempted to ignore the tutelary significance of
the Monroe doctrine.
The triumphs of these attempts would have founded in Latin America
extensive colonies, proud and populous. The efforts of the
ill-organised republics could not have prevailed against them.
For the new continent this would have meant a loss of autonomy; but
the Monroe doctrine stood in {291} the way of any conquests save
those made by the United States, and a sudden disagreement between
the two invading nations, France and England, in their campaign
against Rosas, caused these attempts to miscarry. The three Guianas,
British Honduras, and some of the West Indian islands, bear witness
to the ambitions of Europe; they are the scattered fragments of the
empire which the Old World coveted. Invasions of capital and of
merchant vessels quickly replaced those of warships.
Secretly, without the employment of these warlike means, Germany
began to make herself felt; her imperialism wore a mercantile
disguise, or took the form of immigration. Persevering Teutonic
colonists made their way toward Brazil, Chili, and Central America,
and although the European peril was over the German peril survived.
Neither Russia, who possesses vast desert territories in Asia, nor
Italy, whose ambitions are limited to Africa, to Tripoli, considered
the possibility of conquest upon the American continent.
Against flat invasion by any power the tutelage of the United States
is a protection, but the Monroe doctrine is powerless against the
slow and imperceptible invasion of German immigration. By virtue of
their capital and their adventurers, Germany and the United States
are slowly occupying South America; other continents being closed to
their ambitions of expansion, it is in the free territory of the New
World that they found their colonies. There we find their bankers
and merchants, the rude emissaries of these commercial powers.
Americans and Germans resemble one another by race and in energy.
The Middle West of the United States was peopled by German emigrants;
two imposing cities, New York and St. Louis, are vast reservoirs of
Teutonic energy. The new empire is actuated by ambitions similar to
those of the United States; {292} both are conquering and plutocratic
powers. The German Empire has the passions of a new people; the
active faith, the practical Christianity, the cult of gold, the
instinct of gigantic accumulations, of cyclopean enterprises, trusts,
and combinations, and the optimism, the anxious desire to improvise
the civilising work of centuries by the pressure of sheer wealth.
The Kaiser and Colonel Roosevelt, Biblical shepherds of their people,
evangelists of the strenuous life, direct the ardent industrial
evolution of their nations, and establish a mystic imperialism. It
is from this analogy of tendencies that the future clash will come.
To-day the continual incursion of the United States into South
American affairs and the organised immigration from Germany are
different forms of the same ambition.
In Guatemala and Costa Rica the influence of Germany is immense; the
importance of her capital in Central America can only be compared
with that of England in the Argentine. It is valued at £15,000,000.
Germans acquire landed property, build railroads, and found banks.
In these regions two dominating influences are in conflict: German
imperialism and the Monroe doctrine. The Kaiser hastens to recognise
President Madriz in Nicaragua, while the revolutionists, protected by
the United States, hasten to deprive him of his ephemeral power.
Dispersed throughout Chili, Venezuela, Peru, and Central America, the
Germans are concentrating in southern Brazil. They aspire to the
integral colonisation of three Brazilian States--Santa-Catalina,
Parana, and Rio Grande do Sul. Since 1825 a slow current of humanity
has invaded these rich provinces: 350,000 Germans are established
there, where they rule the municipalities, enjoy rights of
self-government, despise the negroes and half-castes, and live in an
aristocratic isolation. They {293} have retained the language,
traditions, and prejudices of their native country. In certain
colonies of the South there are only 10 per cent. of Brazilian
citizens; the Germans represent the prevailing race, the effective
nationality. Their efforts further the territorial ambition of _Das
Deutschtum_.
Economists recommend that the excessive immigration which constantly
pours into the United States should be directed towards South
America. A tenth part of the population of the United States admits
to a Teutonic origin; there are eight millions of Germans in the huge
northern democracy. Thanks to affinities of race, or thanks to the
assimilative action of the national spirit, this colossal colony does
not form a State within the State; its members adapt themselves to
the American life, and in the numerous schools of the country they
assimilate an Anglo-Saxon culture. They do not threaten the normal
development of the republic, as do the negroes of the South and the
Asiatics of the Far West.
In Brazil the Germans occupy eight thousand square miles of
territory. They proudly contrast the magnificent destinies of the
_Vaterland_ with the turbulent federalism of the Brazilian States.
The colonisation companies affiliated to the powerful and active
banks, in especial the _Deutsche Uberseeische Bank_, a marvellous
instrument of conquest, are extending the prosaic Teutonic hegemony
through Brazil and the whole of Latin America. In Chili Germans
direct the education of the country, and organise the army; just as
in the Prussian schools, they teach an intolerant patriotism and a
strongly nationalistic history.
While the emigrants are realising their imperialistic Odyssey, German
professors are condemning the Monroe doctrine. Hugo Münsterberg,
professor of philosophy at Harvard, and Adolf Wagner, an economist of
Berlin, regard the Yankee thesis merely as {294} a perishable
improvisation upon a fragile foundation. The interest of Germany
demands that the United States should abandon their tutelage, and
that the swarming Germanic legions should invade the southern
continent. Münsterberg writes in his book _The Americans_ that the
Yankee will soon realise "the error and folly" of his argument, which
he qualifies as a moribund doctrine. No Russian, French, or Italian
colony in South America, he says, could create difficulties in the
United States; but the doctrine which forbids their establishment
will be the cause of conflicts in the future. If South America were
set free from this tutelage, if its bearing were limited to Central
America, the possibilities of a conflict between the United States
and Europe would be considerably diminished. Does not this
disinterested counsel conceal a desire to found colonies upon a
continent which the vigilance of the United States would no longer
protect?
An economist who, like Treitschke and Sybel, believes in the divine
mission of the German Empire, Gustave Schmoller, would like to see a
nation of twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants founded in
Southern Brazil.
Concentrated in the three provinces of Brazil, an unmixed and hostile
race would struggle against the Brazilian half-breeds and prevail
over them, which is what these professors of conquest desire. This
fruitful invasion would realise the dream entertained by those rich
bankers of Augsburg, the Velzers, who three centuries ago bought a
Venezuelan province from the Hispano-Germanic monarch, Charles V.
Heirs of this vast abortive plan, the German financiers of our days
dream of planting a foreign province in the heart of the vast
territory of Brazil.
Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in
disguise; they recognise the {295} danger, and seek to avoid it.
Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the
education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop
the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of
Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories
and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of
military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional
struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself.
Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to
enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the
far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign
syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; Señor
Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the
establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in
order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1]
The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country;
Graça Aranha has written, in _Canaan_, the drama of the contact of
races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the
half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon
the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow,
persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its
ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the
triumph of the white man, and the {296} expulsion of the "coloured
man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The
Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination,
and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in
unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish
natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and
have degraded it by their turpitude."
It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves.
Germany, mother of men without number, _officina et vagina gentium_,
invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her
chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.
Without denying the reality of this peril, we cannot but realise that
it would be difficult to establish on Brazilian soil colonies which
should reflect the glory of _Das Deutschtum_. Already 350,000
Germans are lost in the national mass; demographically they signify
nothing as against the 19 millions of Brazilians. To found a
colonial empire in the interior of the Lusitanian Republic it would
first of all be necessary to have a strong basis of population; the
theorists of the Germanic movement of expansion would dispose of 18
to 20 million emigrants in these rich southern provinces. Moreover,
the Germanic invasion is not concentrated upon Brazil. The United
States absorb the Germanic alluvium; and the Brazilian half-breeds
being fertile, the numerical disproportion between the natives and
the blond invaders would in the future be enormous.
On the other hand, the contingent of Teutonic immigration is
diminishing. The modern cities of industrial Germany are increasing
in numbers and in population; they are absorbing new elements into
their artificial life. The rural multitude which migrates is
changing the direction of its painful journey; it no longer forsakes
its fatherland, but leaves the silent fields for the enervating life
of the {297} cities. Its taste has become sophisticated; it prefers
urban attractions to the adventures of emigration. In the last ten
years barely 30,000 Germans have left the _Vaterland_ each year. Not
with such scanty legions as these will Germany establish a centre of
domination oversea, for even these are divided among the United
States, Central America, and Brazil.
The Italians, enriched and triumphant, are invading the Argentine and
Southern Brazil. Theirs is a current of increasing volume; more than
50,000 Latins emigrate annually; they adapt themselves to their new
country, acquire immense stretches of soil, and accumulate enormous
fortunes, until names of foreign origin begin to predominate in the
world of Argentine letters and in the plutocratic salons of the new
continent. They transmit their Latin heritage to their numerous
children. The stiff-necked group of German colonists cannot vanquish
these races, whose affinities are the same as those of the natives,
and who bring oversea the sensuality of Naples and the commonsense of
Milan.
When German emigration is not excessively concentrated upon one point
it forms laborious and assimilable populations. The German learns
more readily than the Englishman the language of his new country; he
studies local manners and adopts them; he brings to the restless and
turbulent democracies of America his deliberation, his spirit of
industry, and his methodical activity. In the Argentine, in Chili,
in Peru, in countries where he has not yet undertaken to establish
the foundation of an empire, his influence has been fruitful.
The tutelage of the United States seems to us more dangerous than the
German invasion.
[1] See _A America latina_, Porto, 1907, p. 323. M. Onésime Reclus
gives the same advice to the Lusitanians of America: "In each State,
in each municipality, let those charged with the partition of the
soil see that they establish no Polish, German, English, or Irish
colonies unless they also establish Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian,
French, and Italian, or analogous colonies; let no colony be formed
exclusively of people of a single nationality, but well divided among
colonists speaking different tongues; and if such a law be strictly
observed Latin America may resist the fatal onset of Slav or German
Europe" (_Le Partage du Monde_, p. 278).
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