Chapter 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.

In England and in other populous countries the position of the German settler is naturally different. The immigration into England began with the political refugees of 1848, and developed its present character and proportions much later. At this moment the German element in England is probably under-estimated at 250,000. It is concentrated in the large towns. The metropolis alone is credited with 100,000 German adults, and its German population suffices to support four newspapers, while a daily average importation of 12,500 journals keep it in touch with the Fatherland. Manchester and Liverpool can boast another 30,000 between them, engaged in commerce and finance. Indeed, according to a common saying, half the members of the Stock Exchange are now Germans, and this very exaggeration indicates the position they have acquired in the world of Capel Court. The majority, however, are rather to be found in the lower walks of commercial life.

The German clerk has become a conspicuous feature in the city, and tends to bring down still lower the scanty salaries of the class to which he belongs. There are eating-houses in the neighborhood of Mark Lane where the mid-day visitor might fancy himself transported into Hamburg, so general are the guttural interjections around him. Germans throng, again, into several industries, while in the East-end there is a large but by no means prosperous body of tailors, whom Professor Bryce found it prudent, for electoral purposes, to address in their own tongue.

Even into France the intruding German has found his way. He has engrossed several branches of trade into his hands, has come to be the principal maker of the elegant _articles du Paris_, and from time to time provokes an outburst of indignant chauvinism. According to consular reports, exclusive of citizens of German descent, the Republic shelters and maintains 80,000 subjects of the Hohenzollerns. His presence is also felt in Italy, Hungary, and the Austrian Slav States. The same qualities win him a foothold everywhere; he works harder, lives cheaper, and asks less than the native. He threatens, indeed, in these respects, to become to other Europeans what the Chinese have become to the American.

Not content with the necessarily rough estimates of the number of German-descended settlers abroad, the Imperial Government last year set on foot a careful statistical inquiry into the number of expatriated German-born subjects. The returns are as yet incomplete, and do not embrace Russia or Asia. But they are significant as showing the direction this vast emigration takes. Out of nearly two and a half millions of German-born subjects in other lands, America contains 1,900,000, France and Switzerland respectively about 80,000, and England 40,000.

It could hardly be expected that Germany, animated by a proud consciousness of her newly-won national existence, should look upon this expatriation of her children with equanimity. There are many things in the position of their brethren abroad which are only too galling to the pride of the arbiters of Europe. Hardest of all, perhaps, for the German patriot to bear is the spectacle of his countrymen easily surrendering their Deutschthum, putting on another nationality like a cloak, and becoming oblivious of the common home. According to Hartmann’s dismal lamentations, the German emigrant is distinguished above all others by the ease with which he effects this change.

Certainly in America and Australia his complaint holds good. The vulgar system of transforming German into English names has already been remarked, and in the second generation the immigrant is entirely American, ostentatiously affecting to “schbick de Inglisch only,” Elsewhere the process of transition does not go on so readily. In Russia the German settler exemplifies the fundamental antagonism of Slav and Teuton, and retains a sense of his origin and inherent superiority among his more indolent neighbors. But in Russia the Bauer is contributing to the wealth, not only of a rival, but perhaps of a hostile nationality. He labors again, even in Brazil, under religious and civil disabilities; in the Dobrudscha the German villages were harried by Circassians in the late war, and now the Roumanian Government seeks to plant its own husbandmen on the lands reclaimed by German industry. In other European countries the emigrant is forced to win a difficult footing by undertaking the most toilsome and unremunerative labor. He is, indeed, reduced into being a hewer of wood and drawer of water for alien peoples.

Apart from these sentimental motives there are urgent political and economical reasons why the demand for a greater Germany, for a German exit to carry off this surplus population, should now be made. A military empire depends upon its supply of recruits, and according to Bismarck’s somewhat paradoxical theory, the emigrants are drawn from among the most capable and energetic citizens. This continual drain of military strength can hardly be looked upon without apprehension.

Again the economical loss to Germany by this outgoing of productive labor is tremendous. It has been calculated at an annual sum of £15,000,000, and for the last fifty years to amount to a capital sum of £700,000,000. These figures are probably pitched too high, but the substantial fact remains the same.