A membership of 20,000 appears to have been obtained, but this number gradually fell off to 5,000, until in 1894 the movement was taken in hand by Prof. Ernst Hasse of Leipzig, a fanatical imperialist, then a member of the imperial diet, who directed it for 15 years. Simultaneously the name Pan-German league (Alldeutscher Verband) was taken ; the machinery of organiza tion was improved and expanded ; an energetic agitation by means of meetings, leaflets and a weekly news sheet, Pan-German Papers (Alldeutsche Bliitter), was begun ; and both members and money again came in freely.
The new league sought to create a world-wide national union of all the Germans, adopting as its motto the saying of the great elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William, the founder of the German colonial movement and the creator of the German navy: "Remember that you are Germans." The propagandist manifesto in circulation before the war set forth : "We must strengthen 'our national sentiment and bring home to the mass of our people the fact that Germany's development did not end in 1871." The programme of action comprised the following measures : The quickening of the patriotic consciousness of Germans at home and the combating of all tendencies antagonistic to national develop ment.
The solution of questions relating to the education and training of the young and the schools in the sense of Germanism.
The fostering and support of German national movements in all countries where our kinsmen have to struggle for the maintenance of Germanism, and the union of all Germans throughout the world. (At the same time Germans living abroad were warned against direct interference in the internal affairs of the countries of their adoption.) The promotion of an energetic German "policy of interests" in Europe and across the seas, and especially the carrying forward of the colonial movement to practical objectives.
Had the Pan-Germans kept their endeavours within the limits of the party's programme much reproach might have been saved them later. Individual members of the league, however, were not slow to supplement its avowed aims by all sorts of immod erate schemes of aggression in Europe, Asia Minor and Africa.
As time passed and the relations of the Great Powers became in creasingly strained, the league itself developed into a powerful piece of political machinery. The fact that many of its mem bers sat in the imperial diet gave to the league an excellent forum for the propagation of its ideas, and in all the more critical epi sodes and controversies in foreign politics during two decades prior to the war it proved an unwearying exponent of a spirited imperialist policy.
Yet influential though the Pan-Germanist movement was before the war, and inflammatory as was much of its influence on public opinion, injustice would be done by identifying the German nation as a whole with its more aggressive propagandism. In the main the movement appealed to and was embraced by the powerful nationalist and chauvinist parties—in other words, by the military men and the political reactionaries—for though many intellectuals supported the league the soberer heads among them kept aloof, and the historian Mommsen even called the Pan-Germans "patriotic idiots." Character of Pan-Germanism.—It would be equally unfair to draw general conclusions from the many extravagances which were uttered and written in Germany during the years of war. The real significance of the Pan-German propagandism at that time lay in the new importance attached to the idea of a Central European confederation under German influence, then revived by Dr. F. Naumann in his book Mittel-Europa, perhaps the ablest contribution from the German side to the literature of a "new Europe," the expansion of the old Berlin-to-Baghdad programme into a grandiose scheme of empire extending from Antwerp and the North sea to Basra and the Persian gulf, and the claim to a vast consolidated colonial empire stretching across tropical Africa, to be acquired at the expense of France, Belgium and particular ly of Great Britain. These ambitious projects are not recalled in order to prove that the war aims of Germany were more im modest than those of some of her enemies, still less for the purpose of pointing the contrast between aspiration and achievement, but rather as showing how many years of intensive Pan-Germanic agitation had clearly familiarized the national mind with the idea of imperial expansion as one which might be better realized by force of arms than by the slow methods of peaceful penetra tion.