But would it have been different under Germany in the French colonies? A Herrero, employed in the Johannesburg mines, wrote his brother in German South-West Africa: "The country of the English is truly a good country. Even if your superior is present, he doesn't strike you, and if he strikes you and goes thus beyond legal limits, he is punished like anyone else."
CHAPTER II
THE "WELTPOLITIK" OF GERMANY
When the transrhenane provinces of the old German Empire were added to France in the eighteenth century, the assimilation of these territories was a far different proposition from their refusion into the mould of a new German Empire in 1871. In the first place, the old German Empire was a mediæval institution which, in the evolution of modern Europe, was decaying. Alsace and Lorraine were not taken away from a political organism of which they were a vital part. The ties severed were purely dynastic. In the second place, the consciousness of national life was awakened in Alsace and Lorraine during the time that they were under French rule, and because they shared in the great movement of the birth of democracy following the French Revolution.
France, then, by the Treaty of Frankfort, believed that she had been robbed of a portion of her national territory. The people of the annexed provinces, as was clearly shown by the statement of their representatives at Bordeaux, did not desire to enter the German Confederation.
Germany failed to do the only thing that could possibly have made her new territories an integral part of the new Empire, i.e. to place Alsace-Lorraine upon a footing of equality with the other states of the Confederation, and make their entry that of an autonomous sovereign state. Consequently, neither in France nor in the Reichsland was the Treaty of Frankfort accepted as a permanent change in the map of Europe. Germany has always been compelled, in her international politics, to count upon the possibility of France making an attempt to win back the lost provinces. She has sought to form alliances to strengthen her own position in Europe, and to keep France weak. France, the continued object of German hostility, has found herself compelled to ally herself with Russia, with whom she has never had anything in common, and to compound her colonial rivalries in Africa with her hereditary enemy, Great Britain. This is the first cause of the unrest in Europe that has culminated in a general European war.
The second cause is the Weltpolitik of Germany which has brought the German Empire into conflict with Great Britain and France outside of Europe, and with Russia in Europe.
On the map of Europe, Russia, Great Britain, and France are, in 1914, practically what they were in 1815. The changes, logical and in accordance with the spirit of centralization of the nineteenth century, have transformed middle and south-eastern Europe. The changes in south-eastern Europe have been effected at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, and have been a gradual development throughout the century, from the outbreak of the Greek revolution in 1822 to the Treaty of London in 1913. In middle Europe, during the twelve years between 1859 and 1871, the three Powers whose national unity, racially as well as politically, was already achieved at the time of the Congress of Vienna, were brought face to face with three new Powers, united Germany, united Italy, and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.