advantage gained by an individual German was reckoned as a national gain, as the starting-point for another German step forwards. Nor was German advance confined to Guatemala: it penetrated all Central America as well as Mexico and the Antillean Republics, especially Haiti.

But the maritime war, the British blockade and Black List and, finally, the participation of the United States have shaken the fabric thus laboriously raised. German ingenuity had overreached itself. For it was the insidious and cruel method of German land-grabbing in Guatemala which more than anything determined that republic to declare war, in order to escape from this ignominious economic dependence, this foreign control of a national industry. For it would be difficult to define a clear casus belli. But in the peculiar form of her declaration of war she told the world under which system she chose to live. For in April 1918 Guatemala announced that thenceforth she occupied the same position as the United States towards the European belligerents.

The iniquity of North American intervention in Nicaragua and the implied menace to other states were insistently preached by Germany throughout Central America; yet, a month later, Nicaragua also declared war, proclaiming at the same time her solidarity with the United States and with the other belligerent American Republics.

In Costa Rica the Germans represented the non-recognition by the United States of President Tinoco, who owed his position to a coup d'état, as a menacing insult to that Republic. Then, the same Germans intrigued to overthrow Tinoco on account of a Government proposal to tax coffee stored for future export. The upshot was that, in May 1918, Costa Rica declared war. Two months later Haiti took the same decisive step, and also Honduras.

The significance of these additions to the belligerent ranks is perhaps hardly realised in Europe. Every one of them is a serious reverse in the economic war which Germany is waging, and every one makes it more difficult for Germans in America to keep up communication with Hamburg.

Indeed, the tale of recent events reads like a mere series of German reverses, snatching away advantages already gained. In 1912, the treaty for the American purchase of the Danish Antilles was all but complete, when German influence in the Upper House of the Danish Parliament prevented ratification and thwarted, for the time, the plans of the United States. During the present war, the purchase was completed, Germany being impotent. Again, Germany, having acquired a strong position in Haiti, designed that the Haitian Republic should become a Teutonised base of activity, repudiating the Pax Americana and threatening the security of American sea-paths. The United States put out a hand, and this highly-coloured vision faded away. Cuba, Panamá, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, Honduras—all of these in turn struck at Germany through the declaration of war[3].

Yet Germany, beaten from point to point, still holds her ground in Mexico. One of the curious side-scenes of the great war was the attempt of the German Foreign Office to contrive an offensive alliance of Japan and Mexico against the United States. Mexico was to be rewarded by the recovery of Texas. This underhand plot against a neutral nation at peace with Germany collapsed at its inception. Yet the present German menace in Mexico is not to be despised. The rulers in the Mexican capital exhibit an ostentatious cordiality towards Potsdam and sometimes an almost petulant impatience towards the Allies. The German is the favoured one among foreigners in the republic. Supported by the German Legation, the German banks, and the countenance of the Mexican authorities, Germans are strengthening their economic hold, particularly through the acquisition of oil and mining properties. This advance has its political side: for hopes seem to be entertained that a militant power, inspired by Germany, may press upon the long southern frontier of the United States, disturb her pacific influence in the Antilles, threaten the security of her maritime routes, and interpose a barrier between her and her scientific frontier on the Isthmus of Panamá. Such schemes may sound fanciful, and no doubt in their entirety they are impracticable. But it would be a mistake to regard Germany as powerless or to undervalue her tenacious and intelligent opportunism. And, in any case, the economic position demands attention.

A word may here be said about the German effort to hold up before the eyes of all South America the spectre of the "Yankee peril." These German efforts have not succeeded, as will be shown later. Yet it would be rash optimism to assume that they have won no temporary success. Correspondence published by the Washington authorities shows that the German Minister at Buenos Aires succeeded in inducing the Argentine Government to approach Chile and Bolivia with a view to a combination against the United States—a scheme which, if carried through, might have produced a split in the political system of the South American Republics. A similar tendency appeared in President Irigoyen's attempt to convoke a conference of neutral American states, an attempt which has had no result except the dispatch of Mexican missions to Buenos Aires. Such incidents cannot be ignored: they illustrate a movement which is not quite effete.

From what has been said above it is obvious that German designs in Central America and the Antilles are not quite recent in their inception. The same is true of another field which for a generation past has attracted German ambitions. The flourishing self-contained German-speaking communities in Southern Brazil offered an attractive goal to an empire which was feverishly building ships, pursuing a maritime future and hunting for colonies. Here was a German colony in existence and almost constituting already an imperium in imperio. German emigrants, brought out by the Brazilian Emperors between 1825 and 1860, had by thrifty and intelligent industry done much to develop the south; and their descendants—now estimated to number 400,000—inhabited German towns, with German schools, newspapers and churches, where even proclamations of the Brazilian Government were published in German. Although not a product of the modern German Empire, this Deutschtum im Ausland has been studiously cultivated by that empire through every possible agency, and especially by imperial grants to German schools, whose pupils were taught that they were Germans owing a prior allegiance to Germany. Some hope was entertained of carving a Teutonic state out of Brazil, perhaps to form nominally, at all events for a time, an independent republic. The disturbances in the south which followed the establishment of the Brazilian Republic appeared to favour this chance, which depended however on one condition, the countenance of Great Britain in order to cope with the opposition of the United States. But in any case the vigour and increase of the German element was to dominate Southern Brazil and help to bring that region into moral dependence upon Germany. That these designs were not viewed in South America as wholly imaginative, is proved by a recent incident. The Uruguayan Government, after revoking neutrality and seizing the interned German ships, asked and obtained an assurance of Argentine support, in case Uruguayan soil should be invaded by Germans from Southern Brazil. It may be added that recent German commercial penetration has been particularly active in Brazil.

Owing to their remoteness and lesser numbers, the German communities in Southern Chile—whose first founders emigrated from Germany after the troubles of 1848—did not invite such large political designs, although there is reason to think that in the earlier part of the war, when a