Other illustrations, in great number, must suggest themselves to the interested reader which might be examined in regard to the actual effect of legal tender powers in maintaining a value in a debased coinage, or a depreciated paper. But it would be difficult to conclude from any existing data that a legal tender enactment has ever given to any money a value which it would not have had independently of such laws.

University of Chicago.

J. LAURENCE Laughlin.

THE COLONIAL POLICY OF THE GERMANS.1

TH

I.

HE responsible directors of Germany's early colonial policy labored under no illusion regarding the grave difficulties of the task set before them. Their view of the colonies was anything but sanguine; they were oppressed, rather, by a sense of responsibility for the outcome of an extremely hazardous series of undertakings, initiated under unfavorable conditions, in an unknown field. When the wave of national excitement had subsided, counsels of caution were heard, even from the mouths of erstwhile agitators.2 Problems that went unheeded in the ardor of conquest now reappeared and demanded a practical solution, in cold blood; it was only the least rational of the Kolonialmenschen who refused to profit by the study of other nations' experiences, and who clamored for the development of a distinctly "German policy."

It is not always easy to specify exactly what a party means when it calls for a genuinely "national" policy. There is an element of symbolism about the term which baffles definition. In the present case one not without its parallels-a national policy was invoked as a convenient short-cut to avoid all the uninteresting and unpleasant exigencies which had marked the history of antecedent colonial undertakings. The fundamental assumption of those who clamor for a national policy is that the experience of the past counts for little or nothing; national vanity and unreflecting patriotism foster the belief that a royal road lies open to the genius of the particular people in question. The

'The present article is a continuation of "The Beginnings of German Colonization" (YALE REVIEW, May, 1901), in which full titles of many books and articles here referred to are given.

F. Fabri, Fünf Jahre, etc., 13; 28; 144. Some of the larger Hamburg and Bremen firms looked on colonization with coolness or distrust. Id., 18. "The "colonial party's" official organ in Africa declared that, "Germany had nothing to learn from England or any other colonizing nation, having a method of handling social problems peculiar to the German spirit." Perry, Traditions, etc. But cf. F. Fabri, Fünf Jahre, 28.

irrationality involved in such a view, is, of course, a necessary attendant upon popular sentiment unbridled by intelligence or judgment.

As a matter of fact the policy really developed was, in several important respects, a genuinely German one. Who but the Germans, for example, have approached the colonial question from the "learned" standpoint, discarding with decision, on the one hand, the empirical, and on the other the "metaphysical" methods of their seniors in the art? This learned attitude may seem amusing-it has furnished much material for the facetious, even in Germany, and, at first sight, it does provoke a smile to find the Dr. phil. and the Dr. juris so generously represented in the humbler categories of the colonial service-but it is none the less an attitude marked by individuality and without its parallel in the history of incipient colonial activity. Perhaps with the Germans such an attitude was logically to be expected, though the historian could doubtless evoke many striking instances of a people scorning its national traditions and superior advantages, and electing rather to revive obsolete and exploded fallacies and flounder about in the vaguest indecision. To assert that the Germans have tried at the outset to profit by the study of the records of the past, and by the enlistment of the services of the best contemporary science, is not to extend them unqualified approval; but because they have attempted with a fair degree of consistency, to use against their new environment the knowledge and experience accumulated by man's centuries of struggle with adverse nature, the history of their colonial activity possesses a certain added interest. The student of social science. feels this interest, perhaps, with especial force; he is always looking for a social experiment from which the tiresome and reiterated errors of the past shall have been eliminated, and where the distrusted conclusions of political and economic science can be fairly confronted with cold fact. In any case, whatever else may be said of the Germans, they cannot be accused of holding their own inexperience as a matter of slight moment, to be put aside with a wave of the hand.1 There seems to have been considerable candid self-searching at the bottom; then an honest 'Meinecke, 104; cf. (Bastian), 59 ff.

effort to offset serious disadvantages of many kinds by calling into requisition the most modern and approved of methods and expedients. One cannot fail to detect the hand of Bismarck in the development of this rational and practical side of the early colonial policy.

Germany was, of course, surpassingly fitted for scientific colonization-absolutely and relatively better equipped than any other country has been. The reputation of her historians, explorers and professional men of science, who have accumulated and imparted knowledge ex cathedra, needs no remark; more significant still as witness of the nation's intellectual life and vigor are the treatises of her army officers, missionaries and colonial administrators, written under the stress of strenuous lives of action, and yet ranking among the very best contributions to science, in their keenness of observation and soundness of conclusion.1 Such studies in commercial geography, physiography, geology, meteorology, tropical hygiene and ethnography, have added much to the sum of human knowledge, and cannot but contribute to the future efficiency of German colonial methods. Unfortunately, experiments in the field of the social sciences cannot proceed by isolation of factors. Demonstration of cause and effect in a complicated social problem is all but impossible, and the captious logician can always come forward with his "multiplicity of causes" or his "inconsistency of effects." Thus might it be in the case in hand: one might be censured for exaggeration of the intellectual element in German colonial policy, in view of the present-day, often unedifying picture of the German colonies. It is none the less true that Germany has stood for scientific method in colonization, and it is only a pity that she has stood, at the same time, for other things which have tended to neutralize and obscure her successes and to cast ridicule upon the social sciences and their conclusions.

The most unfortunate factor in the German attitude toward

'For example; Pfeil, Boshart, Wissmann, Krieger, Hagen, Schmidt, Klose, von François, Büttner, and many others mentioned in Giesebrecht's compilation (Die Behandlung der Eingeborenen, etc. Berlin, 1897). The high scientific value of officers' reports is well recognized (Schmidt, i, 282). On Germany's readiness to adopt modern scientific methods see also Athenaeum, No. 3812 (Nov. 17, 1900).

the colonial question has been as characteristic as the most enlightened element-if the Germans are great scientists, they are likewise confirmed militarists and bureaucrats. Owing their national existence to rigid discipline and vigorous use of the "mailed fist," they are disposed to believe in the universal effectiveness of inflexible system and peremptory action. Education, military and other, strengthens this conviction. But, though not without their place in the management of dependencies, inflexibility and governmental rigor are about as ill adapted to young and chaotic societies as the frontier system would be to the Prussian state. The vital error in the German policy has been the attempt to carry over to the colonies the complex military and administrative system of the home-land. Here it was that the rational régime broke down; such a proceeding was unscientific to the last degree, and its vicious effects have cast discredit liberally upon the solid worth of other parts of the German system.1

When the colonies had been officially annexed to the Empire, Bismarck, always a close student of effective methods, desired to give them an organization modelled on that of the British crown colony, directly responsible to the Chancellor. This seemed to him the most thoroughly tested and successful system when one had to deal with colonies such as those of the Germans. It was evident, however, that such a system must entail upon the imperial government a responsibility for the colonies that it could not well disavow, and under which there might well arise calls for armed interference and financial support, together with other costly and unpleasant contingencies. These considerations alienated the support of the already half-hostile Reichstag, and, except for Togo and Kamerun, where German interests were more substantial and promising, such a form of organization was decisively rejected. This amounted to a refusal of the representative branch of government to ratify actions to which the executive branch was committed.

The position was awkward, but it was promptly relieved by the support of the Colonial Societies. The expedient of the

1Jannasch (368 ff.) comments at length on the Germans' lack of education for colonization, and especially attacks the system of government through the agency of jurists and other specialists of narrow horizons.