"  My  aim,"  he  said  on  October  28,  1885,  "  is  the  governing
merchant  and  not  the  governing  bureaucrat  in  those  regions.
Our  privy  councillors  and  expectant  subalterns  are  excellent
enough  at  home,  but  in  the  colonial  teritories  I  expect  more
from  the  Hanseatics  who  have  been  there."

The  principle  was  sound  and  statesmanlike,  and  it  would  have
been  well  for  Germany  and  its  colonial  empire  if  it  had  been
consistently  applied;  for  then  much  failure,  disappointment
and  loss,  and  many  scandals  would  have  been  avoided.
The  student  of  German  character  and  political  thought  will,  if
he  goes  beneath  the  surface  of  things,  find  a  profound  significance
in  the  fact  that  the  colonial  movement  which  was  inaugurated  with
such  a  fanfare  of  national  exaltation,  insomuch  that  for  a  time  the
nation  was  "  colony  mad,"  became  twenty-five  years  later,  for  a
time  at  least,  one  of  the  most  controverted  questions  in  Imperial
polities,  so  that  quite  recently  the  new  Colonial  Secretary,  Herr
Dernburg,had  to  itinerate  the  Empire,  appealing  to  his  countrymen
of  all  classes  not  to  give  up  hope  but  to  create  a  new  "  colonial
impulse."  "  Help  us,"  he  said  to  an  audience  of  Berlin  pro-
fessors and  artists  on  January  8,  1907,  "  to  make  the  impulse
without  which,  in  Bismarck's  words,  no  colonial  policy  can  be
successful,"  and   this  was  the  burden  of  a  succession  of  elec-


364   THE  EVOLUTION  OP  MODERN  GBEMANY

tion  speeches  delivered  in  Munich,  Stuttgart,  Frankfort,  and
elsewhere.
