I.
The present movement in Germany towards colonial expansion promises to set in its right place the part played by her people in the settlement of the earth. This has been hitherto under-estimated, as Germany has established no colonies of her own, and up to the present century her colonial activity has been intermittent. But the colonizing instinct has, since the earliest times, been innate in the German character. For centuries the history of civilization in North Germany is the history of the gradual conquest of the Eastern Provinces from the Wends, and of the patient reclamation of the soil. By their superior persistence and industry the Teutonic settlers pushed back in turn the various Sclavic populations whose irruptions had once thrust them to the west. Under different conditions the struggle continues at the present day, and German thrift and discipline even now gain ground in the Baltic provinces of Russia. This expansion of Germany to the east was followed by the rise of the great Hanseatic commerce. Nor can there be much doubt that, if the towns of the Hansa had retained their commercial pre-eminence, and if the steady increase of German population had been left unhindered, German enterprize in due time would have claimed its share in the allotment of the New World. But at the decisive epoch the heaviest calamity she ever experienced, and one that influenced the whole of her succeeding history and retarded her development, fell upon Germany.
The religious troubles of the sixteenth century drew to a head in the great religious war. When the Peace of Westphalia was signed, and the storm which had raged through the length and breadth of the land for nearly thirty years, was at last spent, Germany was left desolate and exhausted. Her fields lay untilled, her forests had been wasted with fire, her commerce dislocated, while something like two-thirds of her population had perished. So appalling did the want of men and labor seem at the time that even the Catholic Church, according to some historians, sanctioned marriage among its priests. From that time to the beginning of this century, Germany practically retires from the field of colonial and commercial activity; for, whatever may be the last motives which impel the emigrant to leave his home, the necessary condition of successful colonization in the modern world is the presence of a redundant population at home. Moreover, the policy of the petty Governments into which the country was broken up, was now uniformly directed to attracting and then restricting labor. This was absolutely necessary in the first place for the actual cultivation of the soil. In 1768 the humanitarian Emperor, Joseph II., issued a warning to the princes of the Holy Roman Empire against allowing the migration of their subjects for this reason. With the rise of political ambitions an additional motive was supplied. In Prussia and elsewhere the serfs contributed exclusively the rank and file of the armies, which were officered by the nobility, while the commercial classes were exempted from military service.
After a long interval German population began to recover itself in the last century. But the process was gradual, and it received a heavy blow from the Seven Years’ War, and again from the protracted Napoleonic struggle. During the eighteenth century the only considerable emigration was Catharine the Second’s great importation of German peasants into Southern Russia. And in connection with this appears for the first time that deep-rooted aversion to paying the blood-tax of conscription, which became an article of faith with the Menonite sect, and removed it wholesale from the Dantzig region.
II.
After the Treaty of Paris the enormous reproductive vigor of the German race soon reasserted itself, and the surplus population began to swarm off in ever-larger numbers. The stream of emigration, which had begun to dribble into New York before the close of last century, where the son of a Baden butcher had already established the future fortunes of the Astors, assumed its present volume and importance about 1820. Since that time it has kept roughly proportionate to the growth of population, increasing temporarily when wars and rumors of war have been in the air, and subsiding, as they disappeared, to its normal limits. Taking the last sixty years from 1822, the total number of German immigrants into North America was something over three millions, and the last decade has contributed a million alone. They have increased and multiplied in the land of their adoption, and the United States contain to-day some seven million citizens in all of German origin, who, according to many observers, are destined to become the predominant element in the new community. It has certainly pervaded the whole organization of society. German names are to be found among the leading merchants, the great financiers, and, to a minor extent, among the politicians, and if they occur less frequently than might be expected, it must be remembered that a regular process of converting German into English names, according to their signification, was instituted in the New York of last century.
The German settler, as a rule, makes a less enterprising pioneer than the British. He is averse to giving hostages to fortune, and trusts rather to patient industry along the beaten tracks. But where the English or Scotch American has pushed to the West or founded a new mining-camp, the less adventurous Teuton follows, and, with his genius for plodding industry, not unfrequently reaps the fruits of the others’ daring. Accordingly the mass of the German Americans may be found within the more settled Eastern and Central States. A large proportion go to recruit the territorial democracy, and an almost equally large number find employment in the mines, on roads and railways, and in the engineering sheds. The female immigrants do something to supply the general want of domestic servants, and the ubiquitous German Kellner is almost as well known in New York as in Dresden or Vienna. A small residue, again, which has carried into the New World the impracticable ideas and habits which made residence in the Fatherland impossible, sink into the discontented urban populations among which Socialistic ideas are germinating freely.
Vast as their powers of assimilation are, the United States, however, do not absorb all the redundant population of Germany. Though no longer imported and settled in large bodies by improving Empresses as an example of thrift, the peasants still find their way across the Russian frontier. The Czar now counts nearly three quarters of a million subjects of German origin, chiefly of the Bauer class, and they supply the best agricultural labor in his dominions. But, unlike their brethren in the more congenial atmosphere of America, they refuse to throw off their Deutschthum, and remain in unyielding opposition to their unsympathetic environment
Among the steppes of New Russia, or along the flat banks of the shallow Volga, the traveller will come upon more than one cluster of villages with high-pitched roofs, bearing the familiar names of Weimar, Strasburg, Mannheim, &c. which witness to the existence of a secret Heimweh, æternum sub pectore volnus. Considerable agricultural colonies have similarly grown up unnoticed in South America. In Rio Grande do Sul and the adjacent provinces, German settlers have rendered their territory the garden of Brazil; have given the landscape a new character with their Lutheran churches, and are wealthy and numerous enough to support five German newspapers.
Far away, also, under less clement skies, their perseverance has reclaimed a prosperous domain amid the swamps of the Dobrudscha. The Menonite settlement which lately passed under the Roumanian Government numbers 100,000 souls. The beginnings of smaller settlements, again, are noticeable in Syria and Thessaly, intent on bringing under cultivation long-desolate tracts.