In the year 1882 the German Colonisation Society was started, with the object of acquiring Colonies oversea and the establishment of a navy and mercantile marine to form the link binding the isolated territories to the motherland.
The society was formed by merchants and traders with the end in view of extending trade; but to the militarist section the idea of Imperial expansion presented itself, and to that party the Colonies appealed rather from a strategical than a commercial standpoint.
The society received enthusiastic support, and, indeed, all Germany began to look to Colonies which were to be purely German; and with this enlarged horizon, policy settled down to the acquisition of oversea territory, the ambition being naturally accompanied by an aspiration towards a powerful navy, necessary, ostensibly, to keep communications open.
The German Emperor held very determined ideas on the subject of expansion, but the Chancellor, Bismarck, altered his views only so far as to approve of the founding of Trade Colonies under Imperial Protection.
Bismarck was loth to weaken his military machine by the emigration of men; and the German ideal of colonisation was not, therefore, a policy of settlement but one of commercial exploitation; inasmuch as Germany's aim was to develop home industries in order to keep in employment at home the men who formed the material of her armour.
Germans were required to remain Germans; and this object it was hoped to attain by settlements in German Colonies, where compact centres of German kultur could be established to teach the art of order to the remaining peopled kingdoms.
The German view being that the British oversea Empire was acquired "by treachery, violence and fomenting strife," one cannot imagine, especially with her Prussian traditions, a violent disturbance of the "good German conscience" in contemplating means of attaining an object.
In the first Prussian Parliament Bismarck thundered out "Let all questions to the King's Ministers be answered by a roll of drums," and, in sneering at the ballot as "a mere dice-box," he declared: "It is not by speechifying and majorities that the great questions of the day will have to be decided, but by blood and iron."
Prussia had fought for and won her predominance; her greatness was acquired by the sword; and the Bismarck cult has prevailed in that no other means of expansion and nationalisation than by conquest presents itself to the German mind. All negotiations with foreign nations, therefore, have been conducted to the accompaniment of the rattle of the sword in the scabbard.