i44 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



banking business. German farms and plantations cover more than 

 742,000 acres, on which are 20,000,000 coffee trees, while the trade 

 between those states and Germany amounts to $12,000,000 a year. 

 Throughout Central America, Germans occupy leading positions in 

 business management, professional and social life. 



II. Condition of the Societies invaded by German Immigration 

 We have passed the portals and come into the glory of a new cen- 

 tury of this modern era. The genius of man, which has reared our 

 present civilization through more than four centuries of patient cul- 

 ture, struggling to free himself from the divine right of priest and 

 king forced upon his mind by superstitious fear of a tyrannical and 

 mercenary ecclesiasticism, has at last invaded the highways of the 

 heavens, followed the journeyings of other worlds and, driving away 

 the guard, has seized the tables of their law, so long falsified by 

 " sacred " authority, and brought them to earth for the common use of 

 the race; has plunged into the heart of his own planet and, seeking 

 the smelteries of the gods, brought forth their ores of light and power, 

 illuminating the world and confounding the agents of " inspiration " 

 by exposing the sources of creation. 



By the omnipotence of carbon with the industry of the printing 

 press, the world has been condensed and its nations drawn into the 

 circle of neighborhood sympathies, with the elevating and degrading 

 influences of the world's gossip; its gabble and wisdom, truth and 

 falsehood, loving tenderness and brutal antagonism, so assorted, allotted 

 and mingled, the nations are becoming one people. The political 

 monarch is being forced to concede parliaments to thought, which 

 dares deride royal pretensions, wherefore this century seems likely to 

 witness the downfall of all enthroned power save that of the people. 

 The last tyrant to fall, because the most difficult to reach, being am- 

 bushed in the superstitious apprehension of the masses, will be the 

 religio-political governments of Latin America; governments that are 

 not in any sense democratic republics, though so titled in their consti- 

 tutions and proclaimed in their manifestoes. Comprehensively de- 

 scribed, they are autocratic theocracies, in which the common people 

 are under the dominion of the clergy, who, in their turn, are the 

 instruments of the educated wealthy classes, holding control of the 

 administration of the governments; or, when the laws are not to their 

 purpose, organizing revolution to overturn their rivals of the party in 

 power when they reckon themselves sufficiently strong in the reen- 

 forcing influence of the church. 



There is, however, in every Latin state a party of which the grand 

 objective is the religious and civil freedom to be obtained by the 

 separation of church and state. This party recognizes the value of a 

 public school system, like that of the United States, molding the pop- 



