BRAZIL AND COMPENSATION FOR GERMANY.
[TO THU EDITOR OF THR " SPECTATOR."1
SIR,—Mr. Ormsby-Gore has perhaps been sufficiently refuted, but there is one objection to his ingenuous proposal which I am surprised that none of your correspondents has made. It is that the great majority of Germans in Brazil have no more connexion with the German Empire than the French Canadians have with the French Parliamentary Republic of to-day. "Of the 300,000 German-speaking people in Southern Brazil" (I am quoting a United States Consular Report of 1899, "U.S. Consular Reports," vol. lxi.), "not two hundred are citizens of the German Empire." "Germans" in former days migrated into Brazil from 1818 onwards ; but some of them came from German Switzerland, some from the Baltic provinces of Russia, some from Schleswig during the Danish supremacy in that province in the 'fifties of the last century ; some were even, I believe, Prussian Poles, whose racial feeling Prussia was not then taking special pains to arouse ; and there were also Austrians, Austrian Poles, Swedes, Flemings from Belgium, Norwegians, and Dutch. The descendants of all these people now con- stitute the " Germans " of Brazil. Moreover, most of the immigrants from Germany proper left it before the establish- ment of the German Empire, and such evidence as I have been able to see indicates that, though Pan-German emissaries have occasionally visited the country, and German schools have been established and promising boys have been offered scholarships tenable in Germany, the Pan-German sentiment is still dormant in the native-born Germans of Brazil. I forbear to ask how Germany could " take " an empire several thousand miles off, or what effect the capture, say, of Rio Janeiro would have on Peri or Manios. But we have bad some little trouble even in keeping South Africa, in spite of the large loyal population in Cape Colony and Natal.—I am, [We must close this correspondence. In doing so, however, we may point out that the suggestion made by Mr. Ormsby- Gore was in no way endorsed by us. On the contrary, we trust that the United States will be able to maintain the Monroe Doctrine. Whether we could or ought as a nation to support that doctrine by physical force is another matter. Would the Americans be prepared to approve officially and help to support a doctrine which we hold as even more essential to our national existence than they hold the Monroe Doctrine to be to theirs—the doctrine that we must keep the command of the sea or perish P A deal on the basis of the reciprocal endorsement of our national doctrines would be excellent business, but a one-sided guarantee is hardly possible in these days of danger and anxiety.—En. Spectator.]
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