GERMAN ARMAMENTS AND GERMAN TRADE.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 272, 26 April 1875, Page 4

GERMAN ARMAMENTS AND GERMAN TRADE.

The Pall Mall Budget says : “In the speech from the throne on the opening of the Prussian Diet, the Emperor owns to the commercial stagnation of which the North German newspapers have been complaining so bitterly. The Kolnische Zeitung, followed by authoritative contemporaries at Hamburg, Lubeck, and Bremen, have been telling us that trade has been getting duller and duller; that exports and imports have been falling off; that manufacturing establishments have been turning away their hands and shortening their hours ; and that the hopes of a brilliant industrial and commercial future for the new empire threaten to be unfulfilled. In consequence of the great rise in the prices of English coal, and the wages in the English iron foundries which took place a year or two ago, it had been anticipated that the collieries and ironworks of the Ruhr Valley would underbid their English competitors even for foreign custom. But, so far from this being the case, the Germans themselves still send us their orders in place of dealing with producers at home. If such is the case—and we see no reason to doubt it—it must be confessed they have cause fordisappointment. The Vienna Exhibition proved conclusively that the quality of the North German material and workmanship is excellent. The frugality of the German working classes used to be proverbial, and associations like the Cockerill Company on the Meuse, which are in some sense international, still find that their German artisans are the steadiest and most trustworthy. And as customers will go for choice to the nearest and cheapest markets, we must conclude that the general dulness in Germany arises from some disturbing cause that exceptionally deranges the natural course of things. Nor is the cause difficult to discover, and obviously it operates with a double effect Germany’s warlike preparations weigh upon her beyond her strength. The excessive calls they make on the population affect alike the rich and the poor. They check consumption by arresting the accumulation of wealth. They run up wages by reducing the number of applicants for employment. Matters would have been worse were it not for those habits of a ruder age which modify the conditions of German existence. Women, for instance, are still set to the roughest drudgery in a way altogether unknown in England. Semi-barbarous practices like these would have been gradually falling into disuse had the national aspirations towards progress and more refined civilisation had fair play. But as it is, and in consequence of the aggressive peace to which their late successes have condemned them, the Germans have been hard set to hold their own, even though they have left some of their aspirations in abeyance in the meantime.

“ Now comes the new Landsturm Bill to embarrass their energies still further. It is not so crushing as was at first represented, yet it is serious enough in all conscience, nor need we dwell on its aggravating effects on the position of the nation in general. But there is one class of commercial men it must especially affect, and that a class who pro raised to increase the wealth of the country more rapidly perhaps than all other earners put together. Of late years, and long before the war, Germans have been showing extraordinary capacity and energy in foreign trade. If they have been founding no colonies of their own, they have been making themselves very much at home in the settle meats of other nations. We do not allude now to the great tide of immigration into the United States ; that has been setting thither steadily for a couple of generations. For the most part emigrants to America naturalise themselves in their new quarters. We refer rather to those traders and merchants who have established themselves temporarily in countries where nothing tempts them to form permanent ties. German firms take rank among the leading houses in the presidencies of our own Indian Empire. Germans have settled in great numbers in the treaty ports of China and Japan. They are scattered thickly along our Straits Settlements, and are reclaiming the jungle for coffee ground and sugar plantations in the territories of semiindependent rajahs. They have pushed themselves forward among the pioneers of commerce in the dangerous archipelagoes of Oceania and Melanesia Whenever an adventurous traveller makes his way through those back provinces of Mexico where the State authorities are impotent or in secret league with the brigands, we hear of his bills being cashed by Germans. So it is in the Brazils and the Republics of South America. German enterprise, long curbed in at home by the old-fashioned simplicity of the German people, has been seeking outlets where money was to be more quickly made. It has been extraordinarily successful, too, in its competition with Englishmen. The German has many qualities in common with the Scotchman. He is shrew*?, earnest, somewhat parsimonious, and by no means self-indulgent. He is content to submit to sustained sacrifice to secure his end, and he does not spare himself. What would mean penury and painful restraint to a young Englishman of similar station is sufficiently of a competence for him to encourage him to struggle for riches. A fair clerk’s salary in a Liverpool or Manchester house is more than many a German officer can hope to make in the army till be gets towards middle age. These habits of frugality and the capacity for self-control are invaluable for a worker who is running a race against rich rivals in a tropical climate, Hong Kong, for example, is notoriously unhealthy, beautiful as the island is, Health and activity are best to be preserved by a most careful attention to regimen ; yet it used to be the custom of our great English houses'to keep open tables for their clerks on a really costly scale. Germans have retrenched largely on this lavish outlay, and their subordinates work all the better. The consequence is that they have been steadily ousting us from the'monopoly of money getting we once enjoyed ; that they have been opening new veins of wealth in countries we scarcely deemed worth the working: that, in short, they have been. bidding, and bidding successfully, for a commanding place in the trade of the world. u The mass of the wealth they promised to accumulate would naturally have enriched their coqntry in the end. Though Germans, like Englishmen, have the resolution to expatriate themselves so long as they feel themselves in the swing of moneymaking ; though they have little of the morbid homesickness which paralyses French schemes of colonization ; yet no people is more intensely and genuinely patriotic. They hold with fond affection to the ‘ heimath,’ and neither time nor distance dutri much to weaken tke etruug tie? they

formed in childhood. If they realized fortunes in countries like Mexico or the Cannibal Islands, sooner or later they would come home to invest and spend them. They would be anxious to rear their children in the bracing German air, and educate them in the schools and universities of the Fatherland. It would have been a pleasure to them to enrich their native country with their foreign earnings; to interest themselves, as well as their fortunes, in schemes for promoting her prosperity and resources. But, after all, and after prolonged absence, they are become in a measure citizens of the world. If they have lived hard and sometimes almost desperate lives, they have had their compensation. They have been relieved from burdensome political responsibilities. They have been free to come and go, and to dispose of themselves as it pleased them. They have become awake to the profits of unremitting exertion in the full enjoyment of independence, and have learned that time means money, and that the earlier years of a young man’s prime should be devoted directly to the purposes of his intended profession. Since the events of the late war, coming home to Germany to settle definitely must have become matter of anxious consideration. It was no light thing to bring the sons they intended to follow in their steps and inherit their business and connection within the reach of an arbitrary military conscription. Devotion to the Fatherland, and pride in its newborn Strength and unity, might in many cases have been strong enough to overcome the objections of self-interest. The consolidation of the German Empire had to be assured by an unprecedented effort of sacrifice which would last all the shorter time the more earnestly all citizens contributed to it. Setting aside predilection for a particular country and climate, the duty of every good German was plain. Arguing thus, many Germans, counting the cost beforehand, obeyed the dictates of patriotism; others, as we knew, acted less disinterestedly, and were scared into settling abroad by their military liabilities at home. But what, we ask, is likely to be the effect of the comprehensive stringency of this new measure, pressing as it does upon so many with increased severity? We can only assume that it will be reluctantly accepted as a sentence of prolonged exile by many prudent men of business who are in the habit of making calculations. They do not care to pay too dearly for any luxury, and it must tend to make them renounce their citizenship in the old country as absolutely as those busy Greek colonists who spare nothing but warm sympathies for the fatherland when they have once succeeded in business at Liverpool or Constantinople, The German Government ought to be the best judge of what in ordinary prudence is indispensable to the safety of the empire. But it is certain that its policy of offensive defence is cutting off the natural springs of its prosperity, and hampering its capacity for production in a way which must act most prejudicially on its finances, should the present state of matters be considerably prolonged.