INTRODUCTION
annexation of enemy territory. Such a block, by its magnitude, would furnish a sufficient guarantee that any fresh attempt to conquer the country by force of arms would be to bite upon granite. The Belgian Congo by itself might serve the purpose of making the connexion between German East Africa and the Cameroons. But the Belgian Congo alone, even when our former colonies are joined to it, could never give us economic independence in the matter of raw materials. For that purpose we need in particular an extension of our territory towards the North- West by the acquisition of the French West-African possessions and, if possible, that of British Nigeria and the Gold Coast.—(pp. 18-19.)
There is another point upon which Dr. Oskar Karstedt insists. German prestige has been lowered before the eyes of the natives : atonement must also be made before their eyes.
Nothing makes any impression upon the native except what he sees with his own eyes. He has seen the Germans, his former lords and masters ( Beherrscher ), in a condition of the deepest humiliation, a humiliation which no doubt our enemies designed for the special reason of its effect upon native psychology. Even if, in the peace negotiations, the demand for a personal compensation to the victims of these brutalities is enforced, that will not do away with the great, perhaps the irreparable, injury which the prestige of the Germans, and their oolonial future in 'Africa, has sustained. Successful colonial policy among the lower races makes the unquestioned prestige of the colonizing people a fundamental consideration. A people whose representatives have been treated before the eyes of the natives as the Germans have been, is burdened in consequence of these things with a handicap affecting all its future colonial activity, which may be a crushing one if the proper measures are not taken. Whatever else therefore happens, care must be taken that such an atonement is made before the eyes of the natives as may be most suitable to impress people of their psychology and ideas.—(p. 21.)
2.—Paul Leutwein.
Another writer who has made Mittel-Afrika his special theme is Dr. Paul Leutwein, the son of General Theodor Leutwein, who was Governor of German South-West Africa