Chapter II

the German Peril

German Imperialism and the Monroe doctrine—Das Deutschtum and Southern Brazil—What the Brazilians think about it.

The Teutonic invasion is troubling our Ibero-American writers. The tutelary protection of the United States does not suffice to make them forget the European peril; memories of the Holy Alliance, of that crusade of religious absolutism and reconquest, are still lively in Latin America.

Three great nations—England, France, Germany—aspired to establish their supremacy oversea in a lasting manner. England, a colonising power in all parts of the world, thought to rule at Buenos-Ayres; the defence of that Spanish city by the Viceroy Liniers was, says Onésime Reclus, the Latin revenge for the taking of Quebec. France attacked Mexico, and forced a monarch upon her; England and a French monarch sent expeditions against the nationalist dictator Rosas, and Lord Salisbury, in a diplomatic duel with the North American Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, attempted to ignore the tutelary significance of the Monroe doctrine.

The triumphs of these attempts would have founded in Latin America extensive colonies, proud and populous. The efforts of the ill-organised republics could not have prevailed against them.

For the new continent this would have meant a loss of autonomy; but the Monroe doctrine stood in the way of any conquests save those made by the United States, and a sudden disagreement between the two invading nations, France and England, in their campaign against Rosas, caused these attempts to miscarry. The three Guianas, British Honduras, and some of the West Indian islands, bear witness to the ambitions of Europe; they are the scattered fragments of the empire which the Old World coveted. Invasions of capital and of merchant vessels quickly replaced those of warships.

Secretly, without the employment of these warlike means, Germany began to make herself felt; her imperialism wore a mercantile disguise, or took the form of immigration. Persevering Teutonic colonists made their way toward Brazil, Chili, and Central America, and although the European peril was over the German peril survived. Neither Russia, who possesses vast desert territories in Asia, nor Italy, whose ambitions are limited to Africa, to Tripoli, considered the possibility of conquest upon the American continent.

Against flat invasion by any power the tutelage of the United States is a protection, but the Monroe doctrine is powerless against the slow and imperceptible invasion of German immigration. By virtue of their capital and their adventurers, Germany and the United States are slowly occupying South America; other continents being closed to their ambitions of expansion, it is in the free territory of the New World that they found their colonies. There we find their bankers and merchants, the rude emissaries of these commercial powers. Americans and Germans resemble one another by race and in energy. The Middle West of the United States was peopled by German emigrants; two imposing cities, New York and St. Louis, are vast reservoirs of Teutonic energy. The new empire is actuated by ambitions similar to those of the United States; both are conquering and plutocratic powers. The German Empire has the passions of a new people; the active faith, the practical Christianity, the cult of gold, the instinct of gigantic accumulations, of cyclopean enterprises, trusts, and combinations, and the optimism, the anxious desire to improvise the civilising work of centuries by the pressure of sheer wealth. The Kaiser and Colonel Roosevelt, Biblical shepherds of their people, evangelists of the strenuous life, direct the ardent industrial evolution of their nations, and establish a mystic imperialism. It is from this analogy of tendencies that the future clash will come. To-day the continual incursion of the United States into South American affairs and the organised immigration from Germany are different forms of the same ambition.

In Guatemala and Costa Rica the influence of Germany is immense; the importance of her capital in Central America can only be compared with that of England in the Argentine. It is valued at £15,000,000. Germans acquire landed property, build railroads, and found banks. In these regions two dominating influences are in conflict: German imperialism and the Monroe doctrine. The Kaiser hastens to recognise President Madriz in Nicaragua, while the revolutionists, protected by the United States, hasten to deprive him of his ephemeral power. Dispersed throughout Chili, Venezuela, Peru, and Central America, the Germans are concentrating in southern Brazil. They aspire to the integral colonisation of three Brazilian States—Santa-Catalina, Parana, and Rio Grande do Sul. Since 1825 a slow current of humanity has invaded these rich provinces: 350,000 Germans are established there, where they rule the municipalities, enjoy rights of self-government, despise the negroes and half-castes, and live in an aristocratic isolation. They have retained the language, traditions, and prejudices of their native country. In certain colonies of the South there are only 10 per cent. of Brazilian citizens; the Germans represent the prevailing race, the effective nationality. Their efforts further the territorial ambition of Das Deutschtum.

Economists recommend that the excessive immigration which constantly pours into the United States should be directed towards South America. A tenth part of the population of the United States admits to a Teutonic origin; there are eight millions of Germans in the huge northern democracy. Thanks to affinities of race, or thanks to the assimilative action of the national spirit, this colossal colony does not form a State within the State; its members adapt themselves to the American life, and in the numerous schools of the country they assimilate an Anglo-Saxon culture. They do not threaten the normal development of the republic, as do the negroes of the South and the Asiatics of the Far West.

In Brazil the Germans occupy eight thousand square miles of territory. They proudly contrast the magnificent destinies of the Vaterland with the turbulent federalism of the Brazilian States. The colonisation companies affiliated to the powerful and active banks, in especial the Deutsche Uberseeische Bank, a marvellous instrument of conquest, are extending the prosaic Teutonic hegemony through Brazil and the whole of Latin America. In Chili Germans direct the education of the country, and organise the army; just as in the Prussian schools, they teach an intolerant patriotism and a strongly nationalistic history.

While the emigrants are realising their imperialistic Odyssey, German professors are condemning the Monroe doctrine. Hugo Münsterberg, professor of philosophy at Harvard, and Adolf Wagner, an economist of Berlin, regard the Yankee thesis merely as a perishable improvisation upon a fragile foundation. The interest of Germany demands that the United States should abandon their tutelage, and that the swarming Germanic legions should invade the southern continent. Münsterberg writes in his book The Americans that the Yankee will soon realise "the error and folly" of his argument, which he qualifies as a moribund doctrine. No Russian, French, or Italian colony in South America, he says, could create difficulties in the United States; but the doctrine which forbids their establishment will be the cause of conflicts in the future. If South America were set free from this tutelage, if its bearing were limited to Central America, the possibilities of a conflict between the United States and Europe would be considerably diminished. Does not this disinterested counsel conceal a desire to found colonies upon a continent which the vigilance of the United States would no longer protect?

An economist who, like Treitschke and Sybel, believes in the divine mission of the German Empire, Gustave Schmoller, would like to see a nation of twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants founded in Southern Brazil.

Concentrated in the three provinces of Brazil, an unmixed and hostile race would struggle against the Brazilian half-breeds and prevail over them, which is what these professors of conquest desire. This fruitful invasion would realise the dream entertained by those rich bankers of Augsburg, the Velzers, who three centuries ago bought a Venezuelan province from the Hispano-Germanic monarch, Charles V. Heirs of this vast abortive plan, the German financiers of our days dream of planting a foreign province in the heart of the vast territory of Brazil.

Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in disguise; they recognise the danger, and seek to avoid it. Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself. Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; Señor Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1]

The national uneasiness has even affected the art of the country; Graça Aranha has written, in Canaan, the drama of the contact of races. "For the moment," says Milkau, the blond invader of the half-breed country, "we are nothing more than a solvent acting upon the race of the country. We are effecting a new conquest, slow, persistent, and pacific in the means employed, but terrible in its ambitious intention." Hentz, his companion, proudly describes the triumph of the white man, and the expulsion of the "coloured man who was born on the land." He prophesies a terrible future: "The Germans will arrive with their thirst for possession and domination, and their originality, the harsh originality of barbarians, in unnumbered legions; they will kill off the sensual and foolish natives who have built up their societies upon this splendid soil and have degraded it by their turpitude."

It is the purging of a territory infested by African slaves. Germany, mother of men without number, officina et vagina gentium, invades with her blond legions the land of brown men, sends forth her chaste Teutons to the conquest of the lascivious forest.

Without denying the reality of this peril, we cannot but realise that it would be difficult to establish on Brazilian soil colonies which should reflect the glory of Das Deutschtum. Already 350,000 Germans are lost in the national mass; demographically they signify nothing as against the 19 millions of Brazilians. To found a colonial empire in the interior of the Lusitanian Republic it would first of all be necessary to have a strong basis of population; the theorists of the Germanic movement of expansion would dispose of 18 to 20 million emigrants in these rich southern provinces. Moreover, the Germanic invasion is not concentrated upon Brazil. The United States absorb the Germanic alluvium; and the Brazilian half-breeds being fertile, the numerical disproportion between the natives and the blond invaders would in the future be enormous.

On the other hand, the contingent of Teutonic immigration is diminishing. The modern cities of industrial Germany are increasing in numbers and in population; they are absorbing new elements into their artificial life. The rural multitude which migrates is changing the direction of its painful journey; it no longer forsakes its fatherland, but leaves the silent fields for the enervating life of the cities. Its taste has become sophisticated; it prefers urban attractions to the adventures of emigration. In the last ten years barely 30,000 Germans have left the Vaterland each year. Not with such scanty legions as these will Germany establish a centre of domination oversea, for even these are divided among the United States, Central America, and Brazil.

The Italians, enriched and triumphant, are invading the Argentine and Southern Brazil. Theirs is a current of increasing volume; more than 50,000 Latins emigrate annually; they adapt themselves to their new country, acquire immense stretches of soil, and accumulate enormous fortunes, until names of foreign origin begin to predominate in the world of Argentine letters and in the plutocratic salons of the new continent. They transmit their Latin heritage to their numerous children. The stiff-necked group of German colonists cannot vanquish these races, whose affinities are the same as those of the natives, and who bring oversea the sensuality of Naples and the commonsense of Milan.

When German emigration is not excessively concentrated upon one point it forms laborious and assimilable populations. The German learns more readily than the Englishman the language of his new country; he studies local manners and adopts them; he brings to the restless and turbulent democracies of America his deliberation, his spirit of industry, and his methodical activity. In the Argentine, in Chili, in Peru, in countries where he has not yet undertaken to establish the foundation of an empire, his influence has been fruitful.

The tutelage of the United States seems to us more dangerous than the German invasion.

[1] See A America latina, Porto, 1907, p. 323. M. Onésime Reclus gives the same advice to the Lusitanians of America: "In each State, in each municipality, let those charged with the partition of the soil see that they establish no Polish, German, English, or Irish colonies unless they also establish Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, French, and Italian, or analogous colonies; let no colony be formed exclusively of people of a single nationality, but well divided among colonists speaking different tongues; and if such a law be strictly observed Latin America may resist the fatal onset of Slav or German Europe" (Le Partage du Monde, p. 278).