But worst of all was the story of South-West Africa.  There were endless wars against the various tribes; but they culminated in the hideous Herero war of 1903-6.  The Hereros, driven to desperation by maltreatment, had revolted and killed some white farmers.  They were punished by an almost complete annihilation.  The spirit of this hideous slaughter is sufficiently expressed by the proclamation of the governor, General von Trotha, in 1904.  ’The Herero people must now leave the land.  Within the German frontier every Herero, with or without weapon, with or without cattle, will be shot.  I shall take charge of no more women and children, but shall drive them back to their people, or let them be shot at.’  Ten thousand of these unhappy people, mainly old men, women and children, were driven into the desert, where they perished.  There is no such atrocious episode in the history of European imperialism since Pizarro’s slaughter of the Incas; if even that can be compared with it.

The causes of these ceaseless and ruinous wars were to be found partly in the total disregard of native custom, and in the hide-bound pedantry with which German-made law and the Prussian system of regimentation were enforced upon the natives; but it was to be found still more in the assumption that the native had no rights as against his white lord.  His land might be confiscated; his cattle driven away; even downright slavery was not unknown, not merely in the form of forced labour, which has been common in German colonies, but in the form of the actual sale and purchase of negroes.  Herr Dernburg, who became Colonial Secretary in 1907, himself recorded that he met in East Africa a young farmer who told him that he had just bought a hundred and fifty negroes; he also described the settlers’ pleasing practice of sitting beside the wells with revolvers, in order to prevent the natives from watering their cattle, and to force them to leave them behind; and he noted that officials nearly always carried negro whips with them.  These practices, indeed, were condemned by the German Government itself, but only after many years, and mainly because they were wasteful.  Government representatives have told the Reichstag, as Herr Schleitwein did in 1904, that they must pursue a ‘healthy egoism,’ and forswear ’humanitarianism and irrational sentimentality.’  ’The Hereros must be forced to work, and to work without compensation and for their food only. ...  The sentiments of Christianity and philanthropy with which the missionaries work must be repudiated with all energy.’  This is what is called Realpolitik.

Is it too much to say that the appearance of the spirit thus expressed was a new thing in the history of European imperialism?  Is it not plain that if this spirit should triumph, the ascendancy of Europe over the non-European world must prove to be, not a blessing, but an unmitigated curse?  Yet the nation which had thus acquitted itself in the rich lands which it had so easily acquired was not satisfied; it desired a wider field for the exhibition of its Kultur, its conception of civilisation.