The Audacious War | Page 7

to the astonishment of Bismarck, more prosperous than Germany which had thus received the expenses of her military campaign and a dot of Spandau Tower war-reserve moneys.
In 1875 came the great Reichsbank Act, which consolidated all the banking power of the empire. Then came her scientific tariffs which put up the bars here, and let them down there, according as Germany needed export or import trade in any quarter of the earth. The German people, on a soil poorer than that of France, worked hard and long hours for small wages. But they worked scientifically and under the most intelligent protective tariff the world has ever seen. In a generation they built up a foreign trade surpassing that of the United States and reaching $4,500,000,000 per annum. By her rate of progress she was on the way to distance England, whose ports and business were open to her merchants without even the full English income tax. She built the biggest passenger steamers ever conceived of and reached for the freight carrying trade of the world. She mined in coal and iron and built solidly of brick and stone. She put the world under tribute to her cheap and scientific chemistry. She dug from great depths the only potash mines in the world and from half this potash she fertilized her soil until it laughed with abundant harvests.
The other half she sold outside so that her own potash stood her free and a profit besides. No nation ever recorded the progress that Germany made after the inauguration of her bank act and her scientific tariffs. The government permitted no waste of labor, no disorganization of industry. Capital and labor could each combine, but there must be no prolonged strikes, no waste, no loss; they must work harmoniously together and for the upbuilding of the empire.
Germany did not want war except as means to an end. She wanted the fruits of her industry. She wanted her people, her trade, and her commerce to expand over the surface of the earth, but to be still German and to bring home the fruit of German industry.
Germany has been at war--commercial war--with the whole world now for a generation, and in this warfare she has triumphed. Her enterprise, her industry, and her merchants have spread themselves over the surface of the earth to a degree little realized until her diplomacy again slipped and the present war followed--such a war as was planned for by nobody and not expected even by herself. She was giving long credits and dominating the trade of South America. She had given free trade England a fright by the stamp, "Made in Germany." She was pushing forward through Poland into Russia to the extent that her merchants dominated Warsaw and were spreading out even over the Siberian railroad. Her finance was intertwined with that of London and Paris.
In the United States she was the greatest loser. Here taxes were lowest and freedom greatest. German blood flowed in the veins of 20,000,000 Americans and not one fourth of them could she call her own. The biggest newspaper publisher in America, William Randolph Hearst, figured that New York was one of the big German cities of the world. He turned his giant presses to capture the German sentiment. He spent tens of thousands of dollars upon German cable news, devoting at times a whole page to cable presentations from Europe which he thought would interest Germans. But the investment proved fruitless; he found there was in America no German sentiment such as he had reckoned upon. He could not increase his circulation, for the German-Americans seemed little concerned as to what happened in Berlin or Bavaria.
Prussia learned what Hearst learned, that Germans were soon lost in the United States. She studied this exodus and the wage question and by various arts and organizations arrested the German emigration to America. She saw to it that employment at home was more stable. It was figured that if the German emigration could be centralized under the German eagle it would be to her advantage. The question was where to get land that could be made German. Europe has for some years expected a German dash in Patagonia, and the Europeans outside of Germany have taken very kindly of late years to the Monroe Doctrine. In Africa and the islands of the sea the German colonial policy has not been a success. Dr. Dernburg as colonial secretary has many a time stood up in the Reichstag and warned the Germans that the home military system and rules were not adaptable to colonization in foreign parts; that Germans must adapt themselves to foreign countries and not attempt at first to make their manners the standard in the colonies they undertook to dominate.
While German colonies have not yet passed