Individual settlers are not encouraged to emigrate, but the plantations, ranches, etc., whence Germany drew her supplies of raw material such as cotton, rubber, wool, etc., are developed by chartered companies and trading firms, and the so-called settlers are the managers of these.
Independent German farmers in her Colonies are few and far between, and the settlements which were to be centres of German kultur have not eventuated. A new Germany has not been created oversea.
There was, moreover, no room in German Colonial expansion for individualism, which has proved such a strength to England but was suppressed in Germany. The individual German is not given scope but subordinated to a system.
The truth seems to be that Germany had not got the class of men she required for her scheme of Colonial development—or exploitation seems the better word.
Germany's requirements were lands for growing raw material by native labour, and markets from which she could not be excluded—and she thought she had found them in her Colonies.
The Colonies cried out for European enterprise and European capital, but they did not want individual settlers.
Under British rule the German has proved a most desirable Colonist, but he has never thriven under his own Colonial administration.
He is by nature extremely assimilative, and in our Colonies he prospers, not only competing with but outstripping the British trader owing to the employment of undercutting methods which do not so readily occur to the British mind, hampered as it usually is by a sense of fair play.
In the eastern province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the members of the German Legion who settled after disbandment about King William's Town, Hanover, Stutterheim, etc., have developed into prosperous farmers and merchants.
A sandy waste in the neighbourhood of Cape Town, once thought to be worthless, was subdivided and taken up almost entirely by Germans, and they have turned the land into one of the most productive portions of the Cape Peninsula.