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 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).
CHAPTER III
THE NORTH AMERICAN PERIL
The policy of the United States—The Monroe doctrine: its various aspects—Greatness and decadence of the United States—The two Americas, Latin and Anglo-Saxon.
To save themselves from Yankee imperialism the American democracies would almost accept a German alliance, or the aid of Japanese arms; everywhere the Americans of the North are feared. In the Antilles and in Central America hostility against the Anglo-Saxon invaders assumes the character of a Latin crusade. Do the United States deserve this hatred? Are they not, as their diplomatists preach, the elder brothers, generous and protecting? And is not protection their proper vocation in a continent rent by anarchy?