in any other European possessions.  Undoubtedly the government of the German colonies was in many respects extremely efficient.  But over-administration, which has its defects even in an old and well-ordered country, is fatal to the development of a raw and new one.  Although Germany has, in order to increase the prosperity of her colonies, encouraged foreign trade, and followed a far less exclusive policy than France, not one of her colonies, except the little West African district of Togoland, has ever paid its own expenses.  In the first generation of its existence the German colonial empire, small though it is in comparison with the British or the French, actually cost the home government over 100,000,000 pounds in direct outlay.

The main cause of this was that from the first the Germans showed neither skill nor sympathy in the handling of their subject populations.  The uniformed official, with his book of rules, only bewilders primitive folk, and arouses their resentment.  But it was not only official pedantry which caused trouble with the subject peoples; still more it was the ruthless spirit of mere domination, and the total disregard of native rights, which were displayed by the German administration.  The idea of trusteeship, which had gradually established itself among the rulers of the British dominions, and in the French colonies also, was totally lacking among the Germans.  They ruled their primitive subjects with the brutal intolerance of Zabern, with the ruthless cruelty since displayed in occupied Belgium.  This was what made the rise of the German dominion a terrible portent in the history of European imperialism.  The spirit of mere domination, regardless of the rights of the conquered, had often shown itself in other European empires; but it had always had to struggle against another and better ideal, the ideal of trusteeship; and, as we have seen, the better ideal had, during the nineteenth century, definitely got the upper hand, especially in the British realms, whose experience had been longest.  But the old and bad spirit reigned without check in the German realms.  And even when, in 1907, it began to be seriously criticised, when its disastrous and unprofitable results began to be seen, the ground on which it was challenged in discussions in Germany was mainly the materialist ground that it did not pay.

The justification for these assertions is to be found in the history of the principal German colonies.  In the Cameroons the native tribes, who had been so ready to receive European government that they had repeatedly asked for British protection, were driven to such incessant revolts that the annals of the colony seem to be annals of continuous bloodshed:  forty-six punitive expeditions were chronicled in the seventeen years from 1891—­long after the establishment of the German supremacy, which took place in 1884.  The record of East Africa was even more terrible for the ferocity with which constant revolts were suppressed.