VII.
The incessant growth in the Empire’s population demanded a widening of its territory. Cooped up within a narrow space, the Germans could not breathe freely; they needed new lands that could be peopled, new outlets to drain off some of this superabundant vitality. This, it is claimed by certain economists, is a biological law, and at the same time one of the causes that made the war inevitable. It was in the nature of things that Germany, sooner or later, should overflow her borders. Another legend! Let us examine the facts.
The population, it is true, was growing by more than 800,000 every year. But emigration, the usual remedy for overcrowded countries, had for the past fifteen years been constantly decreasing. The average number of German emigrants, in the period 1908-1913, was 23,312 a year, three-fourths going to the United States. During these same five years, the annual average of foreign emigrants passing through German ports rose to 215,314! The extraordinary progress of industry, requiring a larger and larger complement of hands every year, explains why emigration dwindled almost to vanishing-point. The German, finding it easy to earn his bread and even live in comfort at home, had no longer any reason for seeking occupation elsewhere.
The spread of industrialism in Germany has had another result besides that of drying up the sources of emigration. It has tended to deplete the countryside. In 1912 no more than 28·6 per cent. of the population were engaged in agriculture. On this account the farmer now has recourse to cheap foreign labour in large quantities. Had it not been for the annual influx of six or seven hundred thousand farm-labourers from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, the fields of Brandenburg and of East and West Prussia would have lain fallow, and the squires of the eastern marches would have been unable to harvest their crops. This hardly accords with the picture of an over-populous, famished race, compelled to hurl itself upon the more fertile lands of its neighbours, just as the Teutonic hordes of old grasped at the tempting prize of the Roman world.
The enormous development of industry has been accompanied everywhere by a feature more or less marked, according as the country has attained wealth or a modest competence—a falling off in the birth-rate. Germany believed that she would remain free from this scourge. She was mistaken; nowadays, as a rule, it is only the poor nations that go on multiplying. German medical science and hygiene have succeeded, for the time being, in making up for the decrease in births by a reduction of the death-rate, especially of infant mortality. But the proportion of children born, more particularly in the towns (as is shown by statistics from 1906 onwards), is steadily declining, and this will end by having serious effects on the growth of population, bringing it down, in all probability, to the normal level maintained by other industrial nations.
Despite these evils, there was no cause for any real alarm as to the future of Germany. Yet the powers that be looked askance at her industrialism, which is the prime agent in this weakening of the fertility of the race. From motives of a military nature, they are anxious that the males should be healthy and the females prolific. The cities and manufacturing centres supply the army with a lower average of men fit for service than the country districts; all the more reason for encouraging agriculture. In the calculations of German statesmen, the needs of war take precedence of all others.
As for the Imperial Government, its most obvious concern has been, not to look for territories that may be peopled with emigrants, but to see that the mother-country shall not lose hold of her children in foreign lands. Among those who had long since left their native soil, and had become more or less merged in other races, it tried to revive the national sentiment. To reunite the scattered forces of Germanism and bind them to the Empire by hidden cables stretched across the sea, like the unseen waves of an electric current, was the unmistakable purpose of the legislative work achieved by the Reichstag in 1913, and such also has been the task imposed upon diplomatic and consular agents abroad.
The Nationality Act of 1st June 1870 had laid down that German citizenship would be lost by any one who lived for a continuous period of ten years in another country. The bill of 22nd July 1913, based on the principle of jus sanguinis (right of blood), and not of jus loci (right of domicile), abolished this forfeiture of civic rights. Furthermore, it allowed a German to become naturalized in another country without losing his original nationality. There are cases where a change of nationality is prompted solely by pecuniary motives. In such cases, naturalization is regarded by the new law as fictitious; it does not bind one who remains a German at heart and obtains permission to retain his German citizenship. This permission is granted by the authorities in the State of his origin, provided he is vouched for by the nearest German consul (art. 25). Finally, Imperial citizenship may be conferred upon former Germans and on their descendants, even if they are not settled on German soil (art. 33).
In thus consolidating the centres of German influence wherever they existed—in the United States and in South America, in the Far East and in Turkey—the Government was not thinking only of gaining for the national products an easier access to the local markets. Its aim was no less political than commercial. By establishing these colonies of a new type in the heart of foreign countries, it endeavoured to set up a sort of Germanic Empire across the seas, as a counterpoise to that British Empire which was the object of its unceasing envy. Henceforth the Imperial eagle wished to have German eaglets hatched from all the eggs it had laid in alien nests.