It was a natural though difficult ambition. The marriage of Queen Wilhelmina, and later the birth of a heir, averted any immediate probability of acquiring Holland and, with it, the Dutch colonial possessions, except by means of force. The assertion of the United States’ Monroe Doctrine checked German efforts which had been directed to South America and concentrated in Brazil, where 100,000 Germans had settled and where trade relations had become very close. British diplomacy of a trade, as well as political character, in Persia, prevented certain railway schemes from being carried out, which would have given Germany a dominating influence in Asia Minor and on the Persian Gulf. Although the partition of Africa gave the German Empire nearly one million square miles and an obvious opening for colonization and power, the inexperience and ineptitude of German officials in Colonial government, the dislike, also, of Germans for emigration and the fact that the movement of settlers abroad steadily decreased in late years, tended to prevent, on the Continent, an expansion which would have been assured under British colonization and business effort. At the same time the acquisition of these and other regions such as Samoa was significant. Prior to 1870 Germany was a geographical expression which meant a loose combination of States with sometimes clashing interests, and incoherent expression, and varied patriotism. German trade was then small, the industries too poor to compete with those of Britain, while its people possessed not an acre of soil beyond their European boundaries. Since then it had become a closely-united people with an army of over five million men—admittedly the best-trained troops in the world; with a trade totalling $4,400,000,000 and competing in Britain’s home market, taking away her contracts in India and some of the colonies, beating her in many foreign fields; with an industrial production which included great steel works such as Krupps, ship-building yards said to be of greater productive power than those of Britain, factories of well-kept character operating at high pressure with workmen trained in the best technical system of the world today; with other productive conditions aided by high protective duties and with exports totalling (1910) $2,020,000,000 and imports of $2,380,000,000; with Savings Bank deposits in 1911 totalling $4,500,000.0000 as against a British total of $1,135,000,000.