"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."
Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the Fatherland's "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912 to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many years before that date, an importer of men, instead of an exporter; that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from 1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports, during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.
By a "place in the sun" Prince Bülow meant, primarily, territorial expansion for Germany's "surplus population." Yet even in this respect German aggrandizement kept pace with her fabulous economic development. When war broke out in 1914, the German colonial empire oversea was hundreds of thousands of square miles more extensive than Germany in Europe. It is true that the Germans went in for colonial land-grabbing late in the game, after England, particularly, had acquired the best territory in both hemispheres, and many years after the Monroe Doctrine had effectually checked European expansion in the Americas. As the result of "colonial empire" in inferior regions of the earth, the total white population of German colonies in 1913 was less than twenty-eight thousand, or roundly, three and one-half per cent. of the annual growth of German population. Although acquired nominally for "trade," Germany's commerce with her colonies in imports and exports totaled in 1914 a fraction more than twenty-five million dollars, or about one-half of one per cent. of Germany's total trade of five thousand million dollars in 1912. Germany's lust for a larger "place in the sun," as it has been aptly described by the author of J'Accuse, is "square-mile greed," pure and simple, and as the same frank and brilliant writer points out, Germany not only demands a "place in the sun," but claims it for herself alone, insisting that the rest of the world shall content itself with "a place in the shade."
To popularize the "place in the sun" theory two great German national organizations went valiantly to work--the Pan-German League and the German Navy League. The Pan-Germans, whose efforts were seconded by a subsidiary society called the Association for the Perpetuation of Germanism Abroad, set themselves the task of educating German public opinion in regard to "the bitter need" of a "Greater Germany," to be achieved by hook or crook. The German Navy League dedicated itself to fomenting agitation designed to meet the Kaiser's expressed "bitter need" of vast German sea power. Ostensibly private in character, both of these militant propaganda organizations enjoyed more or less official countenance and support. On occasion, when their activities appeared too pernicious or threatened to obstruct the subtle machinations of German diplomacy, the Government would convincingly "disavow" the leagues. But all the time they were working for Germany's "place in the sun." Under their auspices, the country for years was drenched with belligerent and provocative literature, which harped ceaselessly on the theme that what Germany could not secure by diplomacy she must prepare to extort by the sword.
As the Pan-Germans and the Navy League cherished twin aspirations, it was not surprising that two men, General Keim, a retired officer of the army, and Count Ernst zu Reventlow, a retired officer of the navy, should be moving spirits in both organizations. General Keim, in his zeal to support Admiral von Tirpitz's big navy schemes, eventually went to such extremes in the pursuit of his duties as president of the Navy League that the organization's existence as a national association was momentarily threatened. It was giving the game away. Keim was thereupon removed from his position, to be succeeded by the Grand Old Man of the German Fleet, Grand-Admiral von Koester. Koester was suaviter in modo, but no less fortiter in re than Keim. Entering the presidency of the Navy League in the midst of the Dreadnought era, when Germany's dream of her "future upon the water" was sweetest, his systematic fanning of the public temper, especially against England, left nothing to be desired.
General Keim, deposed from the leadership of the Navy League, was presently kicked up-stairs by the German War Party and made president of the newly-formed "German Defense League." This association was organized to launch a national agitation in favor of increasing the German military establishment.
The methods which had caused Keim's "downfall" from the presidency of the Navy League were promptly employed by him in the new army league. With a host of influential newspapers and "war industry" interests at their back, plus the benevolent patronage of the Imperial family and Government, Koester and Keim carried out for six years preceding August, 1914, the most prodigious and audacious propaganda crusade in European history. Germany's need for "a place in the sun," on whatever particular chord they harped, was always their keynote. The "Defense League" scored its crowning triumph in 1913 by accomplishing the passage of the celebrated Army Bill whereby the land forces of the Empire were augmented at an expense of two hundred fifty million dollars--the immediate preliminary step to the assault of Europe by the Kaiser's legions.
Count Reventlow, a Jingo of Jingoes, rendered both the navy and army leagues valiant support in the columns of his newspaper, the Deutsche Tageszeitung, and in a regular grist of pamphlets and books which his facile pen from time to time reeled off. Reventlow was one of the archpriests of the War Party. A champion hater of everything foreign, he was temperamentally fitted to advocate the doctrine of Force and Germany's right to world-conquest by fire and sword. Count Reventlow, whom it was my pleasure to know intimately, hated England, France and Russia with a ferocity delightful to behold. His Francophobism was little diminished by his marriage to a charming French noblewoman. He hated America, too. I could never quite divine the gallant Count's reason for eating an American alive, in his mind, every morning for breakfast, and for despising us as cordially as he detested Mr. Winston Churchill, Monsieur Delcassé or the Czar, until he confessed to me one day that he lost a fortune through unfortunate speculation in a Florida fruit plantation. Thenceforth, apparently, Reventlow's anti-Americanism knew no bounds. It was more explosive than usual during his discussion of the Lusitania massacre, but it was pathological.
A pillar of the German War Party, whose name is almost entirely unknown abroad, is Doctor Hammann, chief of the notorious Press Bureau of the German Foreign Office and Imperial Chancellery. Hammann for twenty years, because one of the craftiest, has been one of the most powerful men in German politics. For two decades he survived the incessant vicissitudes and intrigues of the Foreign Office, which indeed were more than once of his own making. He was frequently credited with being "the real Chancellor" in Bülow's days because of his sinister influence over that suave statesman. Hammann's nominal duties were confined to manipulating the German press for the Government's purposes and to exercising such "control" over the Berlin correspondents of foreign newspapers as might from time to time appear feasible or possible. Himself a retired journalist of unsavory reputation--he was a few years ago under indictment for perjury in an unlovely domestic scandal--he seemed to his superiors an ideal personage to deal with the Fourth Estate, which Bismarck trained Germans to look upon as "the reptile press." Hammann's function, for the War Party's purposes, was to mislead public opinion, at home and abroad, as to the real intentions and machinations of Weltpolitik. Under his shrewd direction German newspapers, restlessly propagating the Fatherland's need for "a place in the sun," systematically distorted the international situation so as to represent Germany as the innocent lamb and all other nations as ravenous wolves howling for her immaculate blood. That Hammann is regarded as having rendered "our just cause" priceless service was proved only a few months ago by his promotion to a full division-directorship in the Foreign Office. He had hitherto ranked merely as a Wirklicher Geheimrat, or sub-official of the department, although as a matter of fact five Foreign Secretaries, "under" whom he nominally served, were mere putty in the hands of Germany's Imperial Press Agent-in-Chief.
Grand-Admiral von Tirpitz, of course, has for years been one of the super-pillars of the German War Party. The Kaiser's Fleet is the creation of von Tirpitz, though William II receives popular credit for the achievement, and von Tirpitz created it essentially for war. Von Tirpitz once honored me with a heart-to-heart confab on Anglo-German naval rivalry. He rebuked me in a paternal way for specializing in German naval news. Germany had no ulterior motive, he said. She was building a defensive fleet primarily, though one that would be strong enough, on occasion, to "throw into the balance of international politics a weight commensurate with Germany's status as a World Power." Von Tirpitz was the incarnation of the naval spirit which longed for the chance to show the world that Germany at sea was as "glorious" as centuries of martial history had proved her on land. German sailors chafed under the corroding restraint of peace. They hankered for laurels. They were tired of manning a dress-parade fleet, whose functions seemed to be confined to holding spectacular reviews for the Kaiser's glorification at Kiel. They hungered for "the Day." Von Tirpitz has denied passionately that they ever drank to "the Day" in their battleship messes. But it was the unspoken prayer which lulled them to well-earned sleep, for in consequence of the iron discipline and remorseless labor which von Tirpitz imposed on his officers and men in anticipation of "Germany's Trafalgar," the Kaiser's Fleet was the hardest worked navy in the world. No Armada in history was ever so perpetually "battle-ready" as the German High Seas Fleet. It was the Fleet which made its very own that other hypocritical German battle-cry, "The Freedom of the Sea," which means, of course, a German-ruled sea.