Germany's requirements were lands for growing raw material by native labour, and markets from which she could not be excluded--and she thought she had found them in her Colonies. The Colonies cried out for European enterprise and European capital, but they did not want individual settlers. Under British rule the German has proved a most desirable Colonist, but he has never thriven under his own Colonial administration. He is by nature extremely assimilative, and in our Colonies he prospers, not only competing with but outstripping the British trader owing to the employment of undercutting methods which do not so readily occur to the British mind, hampered as it usually is by a sense of fair play. In the eastern province of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, the members of the German Legion who settled after disbandment about King William's Town, Hanover, Stutterheim, etc., have developed into prosperous farmers and merchants. A sandy waste in the neighbourhood of Cape Town, once thought to be worthless, was subdivided and taken up almost entirely by Germans, and they have turned the land into one of the most productive portions of the Cape Peninsula. In America the German immigrants have readily assimilated, though in Brazil they have formed separate centres. In the German Colonies a set-back to development has been the fact that they have never realised the importance of respecting local manners and customs, but the home machinery has been applied in every particular to conditions wholly dissimilar and unsuitable. In South West Africa, for instance, Dr Bönn of Munich says they "solved the native problem by smashing tribal life." Being trained and accustomed to obey, moreover, the German cannot act without orders, and lacks initiative and therefore administrative ability. Compulsory military service has been instituted, and the German Colonial administration is cordially detested except where perhaps it favours ill-treatment and oppression of natives. Where the British have evolved a system of government which is a comity of commonwealths within a monarchy, and hold their dependencies by the sense of honour and appreciation, to which the attitude of South Africa bears splendid witness, the German's grip was by the claws of militarism and terrorism. Under the circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that the Germans should fall into the error that the British dependencies would embrace an opportunity of "throwing off the British yoke"; and the assumed disloyalty of British Colonies, with the further assumption, widely distributed, that various peoples under the British flag were capable of being tampered with easily, may well have been one of the most cogent theories leading the German Emperor and his advisers to their fateful decision. With the extraordinary aptitude of the Germans for intrigue, perhaps the war Lords were not altogether foolish in their conclusions.