Colonial enterprise at first received scant encouragement from Bismarck. "We neither can nor want really to colonise," said Bismarck on one occasion; our artisans and time-expired soldiers are no good as colonists." So far as Bismarck did take a practical or leading interest in German colonisation, it was because he was forced into the policy by an increasingly powerful group of Pan-Germanists who envied Britain's colonial luck and prestige, and were ambitious to see Germany become a proud mother of nations. This group ultimately formed, in 1882, a Colonial Society, representing mainly, at its commencement, merchants of Bremen and Hamburg, who, already having extensive com- mercial interests in Africa, particularly in the Gulf of Benin on the west coast and at Zanzibar on the east, believed that their prosperity would increase if the Government actively encouraged colonial enterprise. Bismarck asked them what they really wanted. Hamburg replied: (1) The establishment of German protectorates over independent territories with which Germans did business; (2) the acquisition of the Bay of Biafra; (3) the neutralisation of the mouth of the Congo; (4) the appointment of consuls; and (5) the creation of naval stations.
Such, therefore, being the colonial plan of campaign, as in principle it was accepted by Bismarck, and the position of Germany in relation to the possible acquisition of colonies being as already stated, one cannot but recognise that circumstances have been very largely the master of Germany, as regards colonial expansion, from almost the days of her birth as an Empire. The Empire commenced its colonial career with a few sand-hills and swamps on the west coast of Africa. Before the war, however, it was in possession, as a result of a policy of acquisition very badly carried out by Bismarck and his successors, of a colonial territory covering an area altogether of 1,158,000 square miles, or about six times the area of the German Empire itself. The density of the population, however, was very small, the total native population amounting to 12,000,000, while the total number of Europeans in 1913 was less than 25,000. Bismarck's actual working idea when he did take in hand this form of Imperial expansion would seem to have been that the Imperial Government should assert spheres of interest, leaving the merchant and planter to do the rest in respect to colonial policy; and here he departed somewhat from the plans of the Colonial Society, and also, but most decidedly, from Prussian tradition. He laid it down as an axiom that the merchant and not the official should rule in these overseas regions. He should want merchants there, as it was an enterprise for which the official class at home, civil servants,
