While the emigrants are realising their imperialistic Odyssey, German professors are condemning the Monroe doctrine. Hugo Münsterberg, professor of philosophy at Harvard, and Adolf Wagner, an economist of Berlin, regard the Yankee thesis merely as { 294} a perishable improvisation upon a fragile foundation. The interest of Germany demands that the United States should abandon their tutelage, and that the swarming Germanic legions should invade the southern continent. Münsterberg writes in his book _The Americans_ that the Yankee will soon realise "the error and folly" of his argument, which he qualifies as a moribund doctrine. No Russian, French, or Italian colony in South America, he says, could create difficulties in the United States; but the doctrine which forbids their establishment will be the cause of conflicts in the future. If South America were set free from this tutelage, if its bearing were limited to Central America, the possibilities of a conflict between the United States and Europe would be considerably diminished. Does not this disinterested counsel conceal a desire to found colonies upon a continent which the vigilance of the United States would no longer protect?
An economist who, like Treitschke and Sybel, believes in the divine mission of the German Empire, Gustave Schmoller, would like to see a nation of twenty or thirty millions of inhabitants founded in Southern Brazil.
Concentrated in the three provinces of Brazil, an unmixed and hostile race would struggle against the Brazilian half-breeds and prevail over them, which is what these professors of conquest desire. This fruitful invasion would realise the dream entertained by those rich bankers of Augsburg, the Velzers, who three centuries ago bought a Venezuelan province from the Hispano-Germanic monarch, Charles V. Heirs of this vast abortive plan, the German financiers of our days dream of planting a foreign province in the heart of the vast territory of Brazil.
Brazilian thinkers have protested against this German conquest in disguise; they recognise the { 295} danger, and seek to avoid it. Sylvio Romero suggests, as a means of limiting this expansion, the education of the race along Anglo-Saxon lines, which would develop the love of initiative and the sense of effort, a migration of Brazilian proletarians who should occupy these southern territories and hold them against the Germans, and finally, the establishment of military colonies in the threatened regions. It is the traditional struggle for nationality, for the possession of the very soil itself. Language is an instrument of conquest; it is therefore urgent to enforce the use of Portuguese in the schools of the South, where the far-sighted colonists teach only their own tongue. Foreign syndicates acquire large and numerous stretches of territory; Señor Romero would have these land trusts inhibited, and would favour the establishment of indigenous centres among the German populations, in order to contend with this perilous invasion by an alien race.[1]
