“Since I have been on this run I have seen California ranches,” he said. “If I had come out to California fifteen years ago, when I thought of emigrating to America, by working half as hard as I have worked—and that would be harder than most California ranchers work—I could have had my own plot of ground and my own house and lived at home with my family. But when I spoke of emigrating I was warned against it. Maybe you don’t know that the local officials have orders to dissuade intending emigrants from their purpose. They told me that the United States and Canada were lands of graft, injustice, and disorder, where native Americans formed a caste which kept all immigrants at manual labour. I should be robbed and forced to work for the trusts for a pittance. Instead of an imperial government to protect me, I should be exploited by millionaire kings. Wasn’t I a German? Wasn’t I loyal to my Kaiser? Would I forfeit my nationality? This appeal decided me. And I am too old, now, to start at ranching.”
Had I been one of those wicked millionaire kings of the United States or Canada, I should have set this man up on a ranch, believing that he was not yet too old to make good in a new land if he were given a fair start, knowing that he would pay back the capital with interest; and I have known wicked millionaire kings to be guilty of such lapses as this from their tyranny.
The imperial German system wanted his earning power and energy back of the sea wedge. German steamship companies promoted emigration from Hungary, Russia, and Italy for the fares it brought. The German government, however, took care that the steamship companies carried no German emigrants; and it ruled that no Russian peasant or Polish Jew bound for Hamburg or Bremen on the way to America might stop over en route across Germany, lest he stay. Russians and Poles and Jews were not desirable material for the German sea wedge. Let them go into the pot-au-feu of the capacious and indiscriminating American melting-pot, which may yet make something of them that will surprise the chauvinists.
Breed more Germans; keep them fed, clothed, employed, organised industrially, educated! Don’t relieve the economic pressure by emigration or by lowering the birth rate! Keep up the military spirit! Develop the money spirit! Instilled with loyalty to the Kaiser, with a sense of superiority in industry and training as well as of racial superiority, the German felt himself the victim of a world injustice. He saw complacent England living on the fat of empire. He saw America with its rich resources and lack of civil organisation and discipline and its waste individual effort.
If the United States only would not play the dog in the manger! If Germany could apply the magic of her system to Mexico or Central America, what tribute that would bring home to Berlin! Consider organised German industrialism working India for all that it was worth! Or Zanzibar! Or the Straits Settlements! Germany had the restless ambition, with an undercurrent of resentment, of the young manager with modern methods who wants to supplant the old manager and his old-fogy methods—an old manager set in his way, but a very kindly, sound old manager, to whose ways the world had grown accustomed.
Taxes for armament, and particularly for that new navy, lay heavily on Germany, too. Driving the wedge by peaceful means became increasingly difficult. It needed the blow of war to split open the way to rich fields. The war spirit lost nothing by Germany’s sense of isolation. For this isolation England was to blame; she and the alliances which King Edward had formed around her. England was to blame for everything. Germany could not be to blame for anything. The national rival is always the scapegoat of patriotism. So Germany prepared to strike, as one prepares to build and open a store or to put on a play.
Where forty years ago the Englishman, with his aggressive ways, was the unpopular traveller in Europe, the German had become most disliked. In Italy, with his expanding industry, he ran many hotels. His success and his personal manners combined to make the sensitive Italian loathe him. Thus, he sowed the seed of popular feeling which broke in a wave that forced Italy into the war.
Germany thought of England as too selfish and cunning in her complacency really to come to the aid of France and Russia. She would stay out; and had she stayed out, Germany would have crushed Russia and then turned on France. But Germany did not know England any better than England knew Germany. The jaundiced mists of chauvinism kept even high leaders from seeing their adversaries clearly.
Austria, too, was feeling economic pressure. Her people, especially the Hungarians, looked toward the southeast for expansion. Her shrewd statesmanship, its instincts inherited from the Hapsburg dynasty, playing race hatred against race hatred and bound, so it looked, to national disruption, welcomed any opportunity which would set the mind of the whole people thinking of some exterior object rather than of internal differences. She annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina with its Slav population at a moment when Russia was not prepared to aid her kindred. Bosnia and Herzegovina are better off for the annexation; they have enjoyed rapid material progress as the result.
Bounded by the Danube and the Turk were the Balkan countries, which ought to be the garden spot of civilisation. Here, poverty aggravated racial hate and racial hate aggravated poverty in a vicious circle. Serbia, longest free of the Turk, adjoining Austria, had no outlet except through other lands. She was a commercial slave of Austria, dependent on Austrian tariffs and Austrian railroads, with Hungarian business men holding the purse-strings of trade. In her swineherds and tillers the desire for some of the good things of modern life was developing. Strangling, with Austria’s hands at her throat, with many clever, resourceful agitators urging her on, she fought in the only way that she knew. To Austria she was the uncouth swineherd who assassinated the Austrian Crown Prince and his consort. This deed was the exterior object which united Austria in a passionate rage. For Austria, more than any other country, could welcome war for the old reason. It let out the emotion of the nation against an enemy instead of against its own rulers.