GERMAN INFLUENCE IN LATIN AMERICA 149 



It is not to be disputed that the German business man, whether in 

 commerce or in the industrial professions, assumes always in Latin 

 America a positive antagonism to the American from these states, often 

 violent and offensive. This action is partly the exhibition of his in- 

 flated vanity and partly proceeds from his spirit of business rivalry. 



Dr. Herman Meyer, a founder of a German colony in southern 

 Brazil, in an address before the Berlin Colonial Society, said, in 

 December, 1904, that United States merchants are trying to win the 

 trade of the German settlers in Brazil and that therefore it will be 

 necessary to assist the colonies with German capital for the purpose of 

 building railroads and creating industrial establishments. 



The pronounced opinion of Dr. Vosberg-Bekow, director of the 

 Bureau of Commercial Treaties, before a meeting of Leipzig merchants, 

 that " Germany must have annexation of more territory beyond the sea, 

 with the organization and the direction of emigration thereto " ; the 

 warning of the Italian admiral, Count Canevare, that " European 

 nations may have to consider the necessity of uniting against America/' 

 with the concurrent expression of Count Goluchowski, the Austrian 

 minister of foreign affairs, are not agreeable trumpetings across the 

 seas, but they bear no relation to the power or character of the German 

 influence at present existing in these western continents. 



A positive and powerful German influence, the grand ally of the 

 Americanism of free opinion with its expression, is exercised in all 

 countries settled by German immigration; it is radically liberal in 

 religion and politics, without the element of anarchism; antimon- 

 archistic and altogether contemptuous of conditions existing in the 

 countries of its adoption. 



This statement requires qualification when treating of the larger 

 " assisted " colonies which contain inferior classes of population. Thus 

 in Brazil a considerable proportion of the German immigration is of 

 peasantry of Baden-Baden, whose people, the last to be joined in the 

 German confederacy, came into the empire through conquest. The 

 ruling power of the principality is protestant in religion, while two 

 thirds of the population is Bomanistic, and furnishes the element which 

 is peopling the southern states of Brazil. They are, in the main, a 

 thick-headed, patient, industrious race, repaying the Prussian contempt 

 with sincerely cordial hatred. They find in Brazil a mentally stimu- 

 lating life, an emancipation from protestant though liberal rule, allow- 

 ing them an assumption of superiority over the natives of the new 

 country. Their priests are men of character, superior to the native 

 clergy in every element of intellectual, moral and spiritual life, while 

 they possess a fair degree of learning and are devoted pastors. But 

 these German peasants of Brazil are superstitious and illiterate when 

 compared with the Germans, scattered over the continent as merchants, 

 clerks, brokers, bankers, planters and teachers. Their influence on 



