From what has been said above it is obvious that German designs in Central America and the Antilles are not quite recent in their inception. The same is true of another field which for a generation past has attracted German ambitions. The flourishing self-contained German-speaking communities in Southern Brazil offered an attractive goal to an empire which was feverishly building ships, pursuing a maritime future and hunting for colonies. Here was a German colony in existence and almost constituting already an _imperium in imperio_. German emigrants, brought out by the Brazilian Emperors between 1825 and 1860, had by thrifty and intelligent industry done much to develop the south; and their descendants--now estimated to number 400,000--inhabited German towns, with German schools, newspapers and churches, where even proclamations of the Brazilian Government were published in German. Although not a product of the modern German Empire, this _Deutschtum im Ausland_ has been studiously cultivated by that empire through every possible agency, and especially by imperial grants to German schools, whose pupils were taught that they were Germans owing a prior allegiance to Germany. Some hope was entertained of carving a Teutonic state out of Brazil, perhaps to form nominally, at all events for a time, an independent republic. The disturbances in the south which followed the establishment of the Brazilian Republic appeared to favour this chance, which depended however on one condition, the countenance of Great Britain in order to cope with the opposition of the United States. But in any case the vigour and increase of the German element was to dominate Southern Brazil and help to bring that region into moral dependence upon Germany. That these designs were not viewed in South America as wholly imaginative, is proved by a recent incident. The Uruguayan Government, after revoking neutrality and seizing the interned German ships, asked and obtained an assurance of Argentine support, in case Uruguayan soil should be invaded by Germans from Southern Brazil. It may be added that recent German commercial penetration has been particularly active in Brazil.
Owing to their remoteness and lesser numbers, the German communities in Southern Chile--whose first founders emigrated from Germany after the troubles of 1848--did not invite such large political designs, although there is reason to think that in the earlier part of the war, when a German war fleet still kept the sea, the manifold activities of Germany included some notion of obtaining a permanent footing in the Pacific. These German-speaking settlements have been carefully cultivated, by the same methods as those used in Brazil, to become a Germanising force in Chile and a German outpost on the west coast. In 1916 a Chilian-German League was established, to include all persons in Chile of German origin and language, with the intention that the members should use their influence as Chilian citizens, especially at election time, on behalf of German interests.