Pan-Germanism is the expression of a national determination to preserve and strengthen the corporate life of a great people; its basis is greed from one point of view, ambition from another, but its effective cause in both cases is the expression of nationality. Having once imbibed the spirit of Pan-Germanism, Germany attained, in the view of the Pan-Germanists, a national consciousness, a national individuality, and so sought to ensure the continued existence of that corporate individual for all time. This new individual, who entered the world in the latter years of the nineteenth century, eventually reached a stage in his growth with which developed new economic wants. He felt that the satisfaction of these wants was only possible by a national expansion, by the creation in fact of a great world-Empire. Pan-Germanism preached the gospel that Germany must be such an Empire at any cost, and part of the necessary cost was inevitably the conquest and crippling of Britain. To commence her new career as a world-Empire, Germany was forced to stand on a great part of British territory.
Germany felt conscious that she was more fitted for a destiny of Empire than Britain. She imagined India, Canada, Australia, South Africa as German possessions, and saw, as though intoxicated with pride, the German culture, or rather " super-culture," being forced upon all the peoples there. Just as the German Empire and its tributary peoples were then subject to the absolutism of the Kaiser, Germany saw, as the ideal future Empire, all those great peoples who went to make up the British Empire subject to the same dynastic despotism. Having such views, one can understand that she regarded Britain as incapable of her Imperial task, and naturally enough it was an argument in the mouth of a German, against Britain, that she had imposed no British or Western culture and institutions upon an unwilling India, and that Australia, Canada, and South Africa were composed of citizens who were free men, developing their own culture and local national ideals, their States free communities in a free Empire. That Britain should give freedom to the Boers as and when she did, was to the German mind the crowning act of folly.
So, intimately bound up with Pan-Germanism, was its Colonial Policy. Looking around, Germany discovered that she had no colonies worth troubling about, and as soon as she discovered that fact and became conscious .of a need for colonial expansion, she tried desperately in all sorts of directions to obtain overseas dominions.
We have already said that Pan-Germanism is something more
