Against flat invasion by any power the tutelage of the United States is a protection, but the Monroe doctrine is powerless against the slow and imperceptible invasion of German immigration. By virtue of their capital and their adventurers, Germany and the United States are slowly occupying South America; other continents being closed to their ambitions of expansion, it is in the free territory of the New World that they found their colonies. There we find their bankers and merchants, the rude emissaries of these commercial powers. Americans and Germans resemble one another by race and in energy. The Middle West of the United States was peopled by German emigrants; two imposing cities, New York and St. Louis, are vast reservoirs of Teutonic energy. The new empire is actuated by ambitions similar to those of the United States; {292} both are conquering and plutocratic powers. The German Empire has the passions of a new people; the active faith, the practical Christianity, the cult of gold, the instinct of gigantic accumulations, of cyclopean enterprises, trusts, and combinations, and the optimism, the anxious desire to improvise the civilising work of centuries by the pressure of sheer wealth. The Kaiser and Colonel Roosevelt, Biblical shepherds of their people, evangelists of the strenuous life, direct the ardent industrial evolution of their nations, and establish a mystic imperialism. It is from this analogy of tendencies that the future clash will come. To-day the continual incursion of the United States into South American affairs and the organised immigration from Germany are different forms of the same ambition.