Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/684

 526 General History oj Europe widened their narrow streets, destroyed their slums, and spread out along miles of boulevards, as new as those of Chicago. Ger- man steamship lines, heavily subsidized by the government, de- veloped rapidly, and their vessels were soon sailing on every sea. The farmers and manufacturers flourished, owing to their new markets throughout the world opened by the new German mer- chant marine. Workmen stopped emigrating to the United States and South America, because times were good at home and it was easy to get enough to do. 940. The German Business Men controlled by the State. Individual Englishmen and individual English companies had built up England's world commerce. But German business men were generally backed by the German government, which put its power and money at their disposal. So they did not work simply for themselves, but the State saw to it that they worked for the aggrandizement of the German government. From a relatively poor country in 1871 Germany became rich and insolent. Although the Germans were well treated by all other nations, including England and France, they imagined that they were surrounded on all sides by an "iron ring" of enemies. When by peaceful means they were becoming a highly important commercial nation they began to denounce England as a pirate and to talk of making "a place in the sun" for themselves by crushing her as their chief enemy and becoming the foremost world power. 941. The Germans taught to revere the State and its Offi- cials. Unfortunately the other nations did not take this German talk seriously. Few imagined that the old Prussian spirit of the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck and the talk of Fichte and other German philosophers, historians, and economists about German superiority would take the form of an armed attempt to put the theories into practice. Nevertheless this hap- pened. The German conception of the State was quite different from that which prevails in democratic countries. Lincoln once defined democracy as "the government of the people, by the people, for the people." But in Germany the people were taught