Who does not remember the remarkable stamp issued by the Dominion of Canada to celebrate the Jubilee of Queen Victoria? On the mercatorial projection of the world, the British possessions were given in red. One could not find any corner of the globe where there were not ports to which British ships in transit could go, and friendly markets for British commerce. The Germans began to compare their industries with those of Great Britain. Their population was larger than that of the great colonial power, and was increasing more rapidly. Their industries were growing apace. For their excess population, emigration to a foreign country meant annual loss of energetic and capable compatriots. Commerce had to meet unfair competition in every part of the world. Outside of the Baltic and North Seas, there was no place that a German ship could touch over which the German flag waved.
It was not militarism or chauvinism or megalomania, but the natural desire of a people who found themselves becoming prosperous to put secure and solid foundations under that prosperity, that made the Germans seek for colonies and launch forth upon the Weltpolitik.
The first instance of the awakening on the part of the German people to a sense that there was something which interested them outside of Europe, was the annexation by Great Britain in 1874 of the Fiji Islands, with which German traders had just begun, at great risk and painstaking efforts, to build up a business. This was the time when the Government was engaged in its struggles with the Church and socialism, and when the working of the Reichstag and the Bundesrath was still in an experimental stage. Nothing could be done. But there began to be a feeling among Germans that in the future Germany ought to be consulted concerning the further extension of the sovereignty of a European nation over any part of the world then unoccupied or still independent. But Germany was not in a position either to translate this sentiment into a vigorous foreign policy, or to begin to seize her share of the world by taking the portions which Great Britain and Russia and France had still left vacant.
German trade, still in its infancy, received cruel setbacks by the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878 and of Egypt in 1883, the French occupation of Tunis in 1881, and the Russian and British dealings with central Asia and Afghanistan. The sentiment of the educated and moneyed classes in Germany began to impose upon the Government the necessity of entering the colonial field. The action in Egypt and in Tunis brought about the beginning of German colonization. Bismarck had just finished successfully his critical struggle with the socialists. The decks were cleared for action. In 1882, a Bremen trader, Herr Lüdritz, by treaties with the native chiefs, gained the Bay of Angra-Pequena on the west coast of Africa. For two years no attention was paid to this treaty, which was a purely private commercial affair. In 1884, shortly after the occupation of Egypt, a dispute arose between the British authorities at Cape Town and Herr Lüdritz. Bismarck saw that he must act, or the old story of extension of British sovereignty would be repeated. He telegraphed to the German Consul at Cape Town that the Imperial Government had annexed the coast and hinterland from the Orange River to Cape Frio.
Other annexations in Africa and the Pacific followed in the years 1884–1886. In Africa, the German flag was hoisted over the east coast of the continent, north of Cape Delgado and the river Rovuma, and in Kamerun and Togo on the Gulf of Guinea. In the Pacific, Kaiser Wilhelm's Land was formed of a portion of New Guinea, with some adjacent islands, and the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, and the Marshall Islands were gathered in. Since those early years of feverish activity, there have been no new acquisitions in Africa, other than the portion of French Congo ceded in 1912 as "compensation" for the French protectorate of Morocco. In the Pacific, in 1899, after the American conquest of the Philippines, the Caroline, Pelew, and Marianne groups and two of the Samoan Islands were added.
In China, Germany believed that she had the right to expect to gain a position equal to that of Great Britain at Hongkong and Shanghai, of France at Tonkin, and Russia in Manchuria. She believed that it was just as necessary for her to have a fortified port to serve as a naval base for her fleet as it was for the other Powers, and that by a possession of territory which could be called her own she would be best able to get her share of the commerce of the Far East. From 1895 to 1897, Germany examined carefully all the possible places which would serve best for the establishment of a naval and commercial base. At the beginning of 1897, after naval and commercial missions had made their reports, a technical mission was sent out whose membership included the famous Franzius, the creator of Kiel. This mission reported in favour of Kiau-Chau on the peninsula of Shantung in north China.
When negotiations were opened with the Chinese, the answer of the Chinese Government was to send soldiers to guard the bay! The Kaiser, in a visit to the Czar at Peterhof in the summer of 1897, secured Russian "benevolent neutrality." The murder of two missionaries in the interior of the province, on November 1st of the same year, gave Germany her chance. Three German war vessels landed troops on the peninsula, and seized Kiau-Chau and Tsing-Tau. After five months of tortuous negotiations, a treaty was concluded between Germany and China on March 6, 1899. Kiau-Chau with adjacent territory was leased to Germany for ninety-nine years. To German capital and German commerce were given the right of preference for every industrial enterprise on the peninsula, the concession for the immediate construction of a railway, and the exclusive right to mining along the line of the railway. Thus the greater part of the province of Shantung passed under the economic influence of Germany.
The entry of Japan into the war of 1914 is due to her desire to remedy a great injustice which has been done to Japanese commerce in the province of Shantung by the German occupation, to her fear of this naval base opposite her coast (just as she feared Port Arthur), and probably to the intention of occupying the Marianne Islands, the Marshall Islands, and the Eastern and Western Carolines, in order that the Japanese navy may have important bases in a possible future conflict with the United States.
When Germany leased Kiau-Chau, she declared solemnly that the port of Tsing-Tau would be an open port, ein frei Hafen für allen Nationen. But Japanese trade competition soon caused her to go back on her word. She conceived a clever scheme in 1906, by which the Chinese customs duties were allowed to be collected within the Protectorate in return for an annual sum of twenty per cent. upon the entire customs receipts of the Tsing-Tau district. In this way, she is more than recompensed for the generosity displayed in allowing German goods to be subject to the Chinese customs. She reimburses herself at the expense of the Japanese! Berlin could not have been astonished at the ultimatum of August 15th from Tokio.
There has always been much opposition in Germany to the colonization policy of the Government, the dissatisfaction over the poor success of the attempts at African colonization led Chancellor Caprivi to state that the worst blow an enemy could give him was to force upon him more territories in Africa! The Germans never got on well with the negroes. Their colonists, for the most part too poor to finance properly agricultural schemes, lived by trading. Like all whites, they cheated the natives and bullied them into giving up their lands. In South-West Africa, a formidable uprising of the Herreros resulted in the massacre of all the Germans except the missionaries and the colonists who had established themselves there before the German occupation. The suppression of this rebellion took more than a year, and cost Germany an appalling sum in money and many lives. But it cost the natives more. Two thirds of the nation of the Herreros were massacred: while only six or seven thousand were in arms, the German official report stated that forty thousand were killed. The Germans confiscated all the lands of the natives.
In 1906, after twenty-one years of German rule, there were in South-West Africa sixteen thousand prisoners of war out of a total native population of thirty-one thousand. All the natives lived in concentration camps, and were forced to work for the Government. In commenting upon the Herrero campaign, Pastor Frenssen, one of the most brilliant writers of modern Germany, put in the mouth of the hero of his colonial