Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/148

 banking business. German farms and plantations cover more than 742,000 acres, on which are 20,000,000 coffee trees, while the trade between those states and Germany amounts to $12,000,000 a year. Throughout Central America, Germans occupy leading positions in business management, professional and social life.

II. Condition of the Societies invaded by German Immigration

We have passed the portals and come into the glory of a new century of this modern era. The genius of man, which has reared our present civilization through more than four centuries of patient culture, struggling to free himself from the divine right of priest and king forced upon his mind by superstitious fear of a tyrannical and mercenary ecclesiasticism, has at last invaded the highways of the heavens, followed the journeyings of other worlds and, driving away the guard, has seized the tables of their law, so long falsified by "sacred" authority, and brought them to earth for the common use of the race; has plunged into the heart of his own planet and, seeking the smelteries of the gods, brought forth their ores of light and power, illuminating the world and confounding the agents of "inspiration" by exposing the sources of creation.

By the omnipotence of carbon with the industry of the printing press, the world has been condensed and its nations drawn into the circle of neighborhood sympathies, with the elevating and degrading influences of the world's gossip; its gabble and wisdom, truth and falsehood, loving tenderness and brutal antagonism, so assorted, allotted and mingled, the nations are becoming one people. The political monarch is being forced to concede parliaments to thought, which dares deride royal pretensions, wherefore this century seems likely to witness the downfall of all enthroned power save that of the people. The last tyrant to fall, because the most difficult to reach, being ambushed in the superstitious apprehension of the masses, will be the religio-political governments of Latin America; governments that are not in any sense democratic republics, though so titled in their constitutions and proclaimed in their manifestoes. Comprehensively described, they are autocratic theocracies, in which the common people are under the dominion of the clergy, who, in their turn, are the instruments of the educated wealthy classes, holding control of the administration of the governments; or, when the laws are not to their purpose, organizing revolution to overturn their rivals of the party in power when they reckon themselves sufficiently strong in the reenforcing influence of the church.

There is, however, in every Latin state a party of which the grand objective is the religious and civil freedom to be obtained by the separation of church and state. This party recognizes the value of a public school system, like that of the United States, molding the