,500,000 a year, and she was compelled
to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome
of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was
that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps,
which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to
be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.

It is the pleasant formula of
polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that
Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when
the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This
is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the
present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not
want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing
and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia's
dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.

Germany came
into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a
singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and
in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to
classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the
comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly
exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered
Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Maetzner and Eduard Mueller, and
German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English
grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the
foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel,
one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of
human experience and to formulate laws for the process;
Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of
devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be
observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and
many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to
Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen,
Helmholtz, Johannes Mueller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the
British and American man in the street, with little interest in such
matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many
who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands
for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy an