The success of the German merchant on the East Coast and over all the world appears to be a question of character.  He is patient, methodical, painstaking; it is his habit of industry that is helping him to close port after port to English, French, and American goods.  The German clerks do not go to the East Coast or to China and South America to drink absinthe or whiskey, or to play dominoes or cricket.  They work twice as long as do the other white men, and during those longer office hours they toil twice as hard.  One of our passengers was a German agent returning for his vacation.  I used to work in the smoking-room and he always was at the next table, also at work, on his ledgers and account books.  He was so industrious that he bored me, and one day I asked him why, instead of spoiling his vacation with work, he had not balanced his books before he left the Coast.

“It is an error,” he said; “I can not find him.”  And he explained that in the record of his three years’ stewardship, which he was to turn over to the directors in Berlin, there was somewhere a mistake of a sixpence.

“But,” I protested, “what’s sixpence to you?  You drink champagne all day.  You begin at nine in the morning!”

“I drink champagne,” said the clerk, “because for three years I have myself alone in the bush lived, but, can I to my directors go with a book not balanced?” He laid his hand upon his heart and shook his head.  “It is my heart that tells me ‘No!’”

After three weeks he gave a shout, his face blushed with pleasure, and actual tears were in his eyes.  He had dug out the error, and at once he celebrated the recovery of the single sixpence by giving me twenty-four shillings’ worth of champagne.  It is a true story, and illustrates, I think, the training and method of the German mind, of the industry of the merchants who are trading over all the seas.  As a rule the “trade” goods “made in Germany” are “shoddy.”  They do not compare in quality with those of England or the States; in every foreign port you will find that the English linen is the best, that the American agricultural implements, American hardware, saws, axes, machetes, are superior to those manufactured in any other country.  But the German, though his goods are poorer, cuts the coat to please the customer.  He studies the wishes of the man who is to pay.  He is not the one who says:  “Take it, or leave it.”

The agent of one of the largest English firms on the Ivory Coast, one that started by trading in slaves, said to me:  “Our largest shipment to this coast is gin.  This is a French colony, and if the French traders and I were patriots instead of merchants we would buy from our own people, but we buy from the Germans, because trade follows no flag.  They make a gin out of potatoes colored with rum or gin, and label it ‘Demerara’ and ‘Jamaica.’  They sell it to us on the wharf at Antwerp for ninepence a gallon, and we sell it at nine francs per dozen bottles.  Germany is taking our trade from us because she undersells us, and because her merchants don’t wait for trade to come to them, but go after it.  Before the Woermann boat is due their agent here will come to my factory and spy out all I have in my compound.  ‘Why don’t you ship those logs with us?’ he’ll ask.