The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-TimeWile, Frederic William
History
The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time
Wile, Frederic William
World War, 1914-1918
Like all the War Party’s dogma, the "place in the sun" doctrine is sheer
cant. Germany has occupied an increasingly expansive "place in the sun"
for forty-four years without interruption. In 1913, Doctor Karl
Helfferich, a director of the Deutsche Bank, who is now Secretary of the
Imperial Treasury, in a pamphlet spread broadcast throughout the world,
thus summarized Germany’s "place in the sun":
"The German National Income amounts today to ten thousand seven hundred
fifty million dollars annually as against from five thousand seven
hundred fifty to six thousand two hundred fifty million dollars in 1895.
The annual increase in wealth is about two thousand five hundred million
dollars, as against a sum of from one thousand one hundred twenty-five
to one thousand two hundred fifty million dollars fifteen years ago.
"The wealth of the German people amounts today to more than seventy-five
thousand million dollars, as against about fifty thousand million
dollars toward the middle of the nineties. These solid figures
summarize, expressed in money, the result of the enormous economic labor
which Germany has achieved during the reign of our present Emperor."
Doctor Helfferich continued the story of the incessant widening of the
Fatherland’s "place in the sun." He told of the steady rise of the
population at the rate of eight hundred thousand a year; of the
development of German industry at so miraculous a pace that while
Germany in the middle eighties was losing emigrated citizens at the rate
of one hundred thirty-five thousand a year, the total had sunk in 1912
to eighteen thousand five hundred, and that Germany had become, many
years before that date, an _importer_ of men, instead of an exporter;
that the net tonnage of the German mercantile fleet increased from
1,240,182 in 1888 to 3,153,724 in 1913; that German imports and exports,
during the rich years immediately prior to 1910, increased from one
thousand five hundred million dollars to nearly four thousand million
dollars, and in 1912 exceeded five thousand millions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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