THE INCAPACITY OF THE GERMAN TONGUE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6090, 29 January 1898, Page 7

THE INCAPACITY OF THE GERMAN TONGUE.

(Harper's Weekly.) While the English language is spreading over the face of the globe wherever liberty is possible, it is sad to mark the apparent incapacity of the noble German tongue to conquer new territory or even to maintain itself within its own legal limits. In Bohemia it is rapidly disappearing. In Hungary it has been exterminated within the last fifty years. The eastern provinces of Prussia have been in German hands more than a hundred years, yet the people there are as little Prussian to-day as when Kosciusko laid down his life for personal , liberty. The Danish provinces were conquered more than thirty years ago, yet the new : generation speaks Danish and hates the very name of Prussia. In Alsace-Lorraine, > men who were babies in 1870 have now , served their time in the German army, and are nominally German subjects ; yet the ' German language finds there a resistance insurmountable, even with the aid of a vast army of spies, gendarmes, officials and 60,000 troops. A large Massachusetts manufacturer of my acquaintance passed through the province this summer, and had occasion to visit a machine shop at Muhlhausen, employing some 8000 workmen. As an American the manager treated him with ■ frankness, and gave him an opportunity to convince himself that the workmen were French at heart in spite of the years that are past. The Baltic provinces of Russia were German on the occasion of my last visit, in 1891, but since then Bussification has set 1 in with a thoroughness comparable only to the South African rinderpest, and before long German linguistic expansion on that frontier will be as effectually checked as it is in Bohemia, in Posen, in Alsace-Lorraine and on the borders of Denmark. Nor is the German language faring better in the German colonies, for the simple reason that German emigrants prefer almost any colonial flag to their own. The official press of Germany clamours formore warships, in order to protect alleged, German colonists in far-away tropical swamps. Territorially, Germany has almost 1,000,000 square miles of colony, but land without population is like a harbour witli no commerce. From the best information at my disposal I cannot discover that all the German colonies put together contain more white people than could be comfortably stowed on a' Coney Island excursion boat. I J