CHAPTER II
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 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; 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.