Page:The History of The Great European War Vol 1.pdf/86

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German industrial products; (3) to provide for the settlement of German population, so that emigration might be directed into German territories and the emigrants retained under the national flag; and (4) to provide territory to serve as the foun- dation for a world-wide German Empire imposing upon the world as thoroughly as possible a German culture and dominating the world politically on land and sea.

After thirty years of strenuous and unscrupulous struggle and strategy in this direction, Germany failed most utterly and com- pletely to attain or even to approach the attainment of her colonial ideal. Not one of the German colonies ever paid its own way save Togoland, and the area of Togoland was only 33,700 square miles out of a total colonial area of over 1,000,000. The colonies proved during the whole of that period most unsatisfactory as a source of the supply of even raw material for home industry. Much was hoped for by Germany in the way of colonial imports of cotton and coffee, for instance ; but the total colonial contribution to Germany under these heads never exceeded the insignificant proportion of one-fourth per cent. The contribution of rubber even was only 14 per cent. As for the export of cattle from the colonies, that was practically put_an end to by the barbarous extermination of the Hereros in German South-West Africa. Before then that colony was a prosperous grazing country and exported a large quantity of cattle. That extermination of the Hereros was as useless as cowardly and barbarous, though probably it may have been carried out in order to give the army a taste for blood which might come in useful in some future European war.

When one considers the German colonies as new markets provided for German industrial products one finds very little to warrant the conclusion that even in this respect they were a satisfactory feature in German world-policy. The exports from Germany to her colonies increased very largely in value during the last ten years before the war. Their amounts and their increase, however, were largely illusory. Probably not half of the trade could be attributed to the fact of territorial possession, and to that extent it was almost entirely merchandise for the use of the officials and white settlers. Then again the values were taken at the port of arrival, so that a high proportion consisted of freightage charges. Thus the agricultural machinery imported into East Africa was valued at £3 5s. per cwt., while the same imports into Germany figured in the trade returns at a value of about £2 per cwt. Figures have already been given which prove conclusively the failure of the German colonies from the point �