England and Germany

AMONG the changes and transformations of the past half-century none is more curious or more complete than the revolution which has overtaken Anglo-German relations. As late as 1850 Germany was not only Great Britain’s admiring friend, but in some sort her pupil. On almost all points of political, economic, and constitutional theory the bulk of the German nation, with the most liberal and intelligent men at their head, looked to England as their guide. The enthusiasm for the British Constitution which Montesquieu set ablaze throughout Europe was shared nowhere more heartily than in Prussia. The debt England owed to Germany in philosophy, science, and classical poetry, was amply repaid by Adam Smith and his successors, and by the example Great Britain afforded of a nation at once self-governing, united, and powerful. British freedom and greatness became the theme of German panegyrics, and the British Empire, in those halcyon days, was not even grudged.

That was the time when Englishmen and Germans were perpetually reminding themselves that they came of common stock and had fought out together the battles of the Reformation, and of European liberty, against Louis XIV and Napoleon. For a while it seemed as if the whole movement of German destiny might develop along English lines. The gifted and powerful, if somewhat impractical, National Liberals of the day looked forward to and worked for a peaceful union of all German states under Prussian leadership, that should closely follow the English model. Centralization, militarism, and the semi-paternal theory of government were equally abhorrent to them. What they aimed at was a liberal constitution and a popular monarchy, based upon the federal system and buttressed by a real and adequate representation of the people, and above all, by a responsible executive. Such a system, they argued, if erected in Berlin would ultimately vanquish the stubborn spirit of particularism and draw to Prussia all the states of Germany in a durable federation. This was the party, and these the views, with which the late Empress Frederick, herself an Englishwoman, was identified, and their triumph or failure meant the triumph or failure of English influence.

Opposed to them stood Bismarck, Moltke,and Roon, and ultimately King William, all alike convinced that only through war could German unity be secured. The battle between the two sections opened formally when, the Lower House having rejected the army estimates, Bismarck undertook to govern the country, double and reorganize the Prussian army, and enforce all the rigors of conscription, with or without the sanction of Parliament. The Liberals opposed him to a man, and bombarded all his proposals with precedents drawn from British sources. The result is a matter of history. Bismarck’s masterly and masterful policy, and the brilliant results it led to, swept all before it, crushed the Liberals out of existence, and hopelessly discredited the English notions and sympathies they represented. From the moment he began to get the upper hand the disparagement of all things English became a political necessity. When Sedan and the proclamation of the Emperor at Versailles brought full and final success, the whole nation was converted to the Bistnarckian Staatsidee. The altars at which it had worshiped were overthrown, and those which it had formerly turned from in high intellectual disdain were installed in their place. Universal military service became the popular idol and a strongly centralized, half-patriarchal, and intensely active government, completely ousted the old ideals of constitutionalism and individual self-reliance.

Never was a mental revolution so speedy and comprehensive. England fell rapidly in the estimation of Germans. To deride British institutions and exalt by implication the Hohenzollern system, to belittle the British voluntary army in order that Germans might be still further convinced that conscription alone was compatible with military efficiency, grew to be the favorite pastime of German politicians, journalists, and professors. It is hardly too much to say that within the past fifty years the whole tale of English history has been rewritten to suit the change in German sentiment.

But, besides all this, Germany had some tangible grounds of complaint against England. Professor Marcks of Leipsic, in his pamphlet on Anglo-German relations from 1500 to 1900, claims that after 1848 England ‘invariably showed herself unfriendly’ to the German struggle for unity. ‘ It was so in the crisis of 1848; throughout the SchleswigHolstein complication with Denmark, in which Germany prosecuted a claim that was inevitable and national, England was always Danish; through all the great events of that chain of years, through all the wars in which Germany was concerned up to 1871, it was the same. Directly or indirectly, wholly or partially, England always ranged herself with the opponents, never with the friends, of German unity. She never brought her whole power to bear against it, for English Liberalism was then at the zenith of its influence, and there was scarcely a really strong English foreign policy in any direction. But what there was, was hostile to Germany.’

This is, in the main, a true bill. Great Britain greatly offended Prussian mercantile interests by refusing to assist in obtaining the neutrality of the Baltic. Her attitude on the question of the Elbe Duchies showed neither consistency nor strength, and from the Franco-Prussian War, as from the American Civil War, she emerged with nothing but the cordial, and possibly deserved, animosity of both sides. The disappearance of a weakly, divided Germany, and the rise of a powerful, aggressive empire in its place, did not greatly appeal to British sympathies or to t he popular view of British commercial interests. From the moment that Germany became united, she became England’s rival, not only in trade, but in political ambitions; and in neither direction was she a welcome competitor.

To this want of sympathy the defects in the national character of both peoples have contributed their inevitable share. The newly-awakened spirit of German nationalism, and of pride in the German race, seemed to foreigners to run occasionally into needless extremes, and to take on the air of a rather puerile assertiveness. It seemed for a while as if the Germans found it necessary to be continually calling attention to their fresh-won importance, lest the world should forget it. They had an unexpected consciousness of strength, and were almost morbidly anxious to have it recognized. The result was the development of what in England was considered a vein of bumptiousness, or at least of unnecessary brusqueness. The Germans, on their part, complained that Englishmen never fully gave them their due; still affected to regard them as interesting prodigies rather than as a matured and responsible nation; would persist in that ' lecturing ’ attitude which Americans have long learned to know, but hardly to love, in their kinsmen; and never brought themselves to the point of admitting that Germany had grown out of British tutelage.

These things are trivial — if anything is really trivial in determining international likes and dislikes. They certainly helped, however, in widening the breach between the two peoples. Success made the Germans rather ' touchy,’ and British ' superiority ’ flicked them on the raw. The estrangement grew sharper, on the German side at least, when the colonial fever began to influence German foreign policy, and it was found that so far as all hope of a Greater Germany, that should spread the German idea and receive German colonists and extend German trade, was concerned, the Empire had been born too late. Wherever Germany turned, she found England comfortably settled in her path. The cake, as the late Herr Richter once remarked, had been divided long ago, and nothing was left for the latest comer but the crumbs under the table. This was, and is, a natural, unreasoning, and keenly-felt grievance; and as the stress of rivalry in other spheres grew fiercer, as the Germans, duplicating British experience, began to change from a mainly agricultural to a mainly industrial basis, and as they woke, or were prodded awake, to the necessity of a strong navy and a large mercantile marine, the discovery was made that here, too, Great Britain had been before them.

That England should have acquired such a start at so trifling a cost, while Germany was struggling through blood to attain the indispensable condition of unity, appears to Germans so monstrously unfair as to afford a strong presumption of trickery. From that to convicting Great Britain of hypocritical duplicity, of stirring up strife among her rivals while she quietly carries off the booty, is a short step. Even Americans twenty years ago had not so flattering a suspiciousness of British diplomacy as have the Germans to-day — a suspiciousness that wakes Homeric laughter among Englishmen, who are but too conscious that the great merit, or the great failing, of their diplomacy is that there is nothing to suspect in it. Nor have the ruling authorities, either at Potsdam or in the Wilhelmstrasse, done anything to dispel the bogy. They have, on the contrary, used it with consummate skill to further their own ends. Had it not been for England and the assumed necessity of being always and everywhere on guard against her wiles, it is doubtful whether the Kaiser would have been able to launch and popularize his naval programme.

Always comically surprised to find themselves disliked, always constitutionally unaware of the offense they are apt to give, Englishmen were long in gauging the new German spirit at its right significance. It is less than eleven years since Mr. Chamberlain made his incredible speech proposing an AngloGerman-American allianceagainst Russia. The late Lord Salisbury, to the end of his official career, was dominated by the philo-German traditions in which he grew up; and were he to revisit the earth to-day he would be astonished at nothing so much as at finding France, whom he had always dreaded as England’s natural and predestined enemy, her closest friend. In this matter of their relations with Germany the mass of Englishmen, indeed, have for many years past been considerably more advanced than their rulers. From the moment of the Kaiser’s telegram to President Krüger, in 1896, skepticism toward Germany’s friendliness, and suspicion of her aims, have steadily deepened in the British consciousness.

Between two empires, — the one old, somnolent, and possessed of trade, colonies, and sea-power, and the other young, aspiring, and in search of trade, colonies, and sea-power,—a certain amount of friction and jealousy was inevitable. But it has been the unhappy chance of the past decade to intensify every element of Anglo-German ill-will. The Berserker fury of the German press during the Boer War penetrated, for almost the first time in British history, the insular indifference to foreign criticism. The English, as Washington Irving noted, are bad haters. They are far too comfortable and too easygoing to keep a grudge alive. But there are limits of calumny beyond which it is dangerous to go; and the Germans overstepped them when they represented the British army in South Africa as murdering prisoners of war, forcing Boer women upon the firingline and tying them to stakes in front of the trenches, pillaging and killing for the fun of the thing, and instituting the concentration-camps partly to kill off those interned in them by disease and starvation, and partly to provide material for the unholy appetites of British ‘ mercenaries.’ It was borne in upon Englishmen that, had any other country but their own been in question, — had it, for instance, been France or Russia whom the German papers were reviling, — the authorities would at once, and peremptorily, have discountenanced and stopped the campaign. But as it was only England, the Chancellor himself took a hand in the game, and deliberately, when it seemed to have about blazed itself out, put fresh fuel on the fire. On the people of the United Kingdom the contrast made a bitter impression that has not yet been wholly effaced. The storm that instantaneously, and throughout all England, broke over the Anglo-German expedition against Venezuela in 1903, had its source not only in the conviction that it was a diplomatic blunder of the first magnitude, but in a sense of outraged national dignity. After all that had passed, Englishmen could not stomach the idea of coöperation with Germany.

But it is not necessary to explore with any thoroughness the various incidents that in the past ten years have contributed to keep England and Germany at odds. They clashed over Samoa; before, during, and after the Boxer éntente, they disagreed repeatedly in China; over the problems of the Balkans their harmony has not at any time been more than superficial; the formation of the Anglo-French entente was deeply resented by the Wilhelmstrasse, and provoked the Morocco crisis that for a year and more kept all Europe in fear of war; the ending of the old irrational antagonism between England and Russia still further strengthened the apprehensions of Germany that it was the chief aim of British policy to isolate her in Europe; and all the while the commercial, and in particular the naval, rivalry between the two countries has gone on increasing in magnitude and intensity. What gives these developments their sinister significance is that they have helped to bring about, and are in turn interpreted by, a mutual spirit of distrust and alarm. In diplomacy the spirit is everything. If there is confidence, good-will, and a sincere desire for conciliation, the most formidable-looking issue proves easy of solution. If none of these qualities and conditions obtains, then the most trivial issue may engender a crisis.

Anglo-German relations bear witness to the force of this venerable truism. It ought not to be difficult to formulate them on a rational basis. Nor would it be difficult, if international sympathies and aversions were governed by facts and reasoned probabilities instead of by unthinking impulses, baseless conjectures, and ignorant perversities. At no specific point are England and Germany in conflict. At very few points are they even in contact. No accommodation between them such as England has effected with Russia and with France is possible, because the material for such an accommodation does not exist. That is, perhaps, the first thing to be borne in mind when AngloGerman relations are approached from the standpoint of common sense. From first to last there has been in this warfare hardly anything tangible, hardly anything that could be made the subject of a diplomatic bargain, no suggestion of a clash of interests that could be averted by a give-and-take compromise, no instance of a dispute that could be stated in black and white and solved by a matter-of-fact negotiation.

But this, while it invests the AngloGerman feud with an egregious absurdity, by no means diminishes its seriousness or shortens its life. On the contrary it heightens the one and prolongs the other. Nothing in the world is so hard to counter as suspicions that cannot in the nature of things be disproved or brought to the test of fact, that relate less to the present than to some indefinite future, and that tend through infinite repetition and by their very elusiveness to acquire a certain credibility. It is suspicions of this kind that have poisoned the public mind of England and Germany. In default of facts, the two nations have made an issue of tendencies, motives, and possibilities. Neither can bring the other to book, because each professes to be thinking of ‘the year after next.’ Some people in Germany seem to think that England is an enlarged edition of the National Review. Some Englishmen seem to think that the ‘ literature ’ of the Pan-Germans is the daily diet of the German people. The Anglophobe regards King Edward as an unblushing monster of craft and cant. The Teutophobe regards the Kaiser as the embodiment of every diplomatic black art. And so it goes. If the Hague Tribunal were called in to diagnose Anglo-German relations, they would send, not for a diplomatist, but for an alienist. Their judgment would be that the two peoples have lost all touch with actualities, and that while there is little or nothing in their material or political interests that needs adjusting, their state of mind demands instant inquiry.

The outstanding symptom of the Anglo-German ailment is a fusillade of almost identical charges. All the schemes and ambitions the anti-Germans in England impute to Germany, the anti-British in Germany impute to England. Every suspicion that is entertained in London about the Kaiser is entertained in Berlin about King Edward. Great Britain sends a squadron to visit the Baltic, and multitudes of Germans look upon its advent as scarcely less than a declaration of war. Germany increases her navy, and the British Teutophobes at once warn their countrymen to prepare for a German invasion. Great Britain settles her oldstanding difficulties with France and Russia,and Germany proclaims that it is all part of a plot to humiliate and hem her in. Trouble breaks out on the Egyptian frontier, and Great Britain is instantly assured that Germany has instigated it. The British Prime Minister proposes a scheme for limitation of armaments, and Germany detects in it a consummately crafty and hypocritical conspiracy against German interests. The Kaiser writes a friendly note to the British First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Teutophobes translate it as an attempt to influence the British naval estimates. The German Chancellor says something complimentary about England, and his words are scoffed at as one more move in a game of calculated duplicity. So far at times has the delirium gone that the humble German waiter in the English hotel has been transformed into an advanceagent of the army of invasion.

And the curious part of it is that the English and German peoples are on the whole serious, sensible, and pacific folk, who, though narrow, have never been without a capacity for seeing and thinking clearly, and who, in their saner hours, are perfectly well aware that a war between their respective countries would be a profitless crime. Yet for nearly ten years they have allowed themselves to be lashed by the extremists among them into a state of confusion and suspiciousness, where facts and realities almost cease to exist, and where reason is lost in a paper warfare of railings, mare’s nests, and international tu quoques. Nine-tenths of the antagonism that has been fomented between them is simply a nightmare of the imagination. The remaining tenth has substance, or at least plausibility, and needs to be examined — but candidly and without heat.

There are three possible causes of an Anglo-German conflict. In British, as indeed in most foreign, eyes the German Empire is the creation of the three interdependent processes of diplomacy, war, and spoliation. Germans perhaps do not altogether realize the impression produced abroad by the character of their successes under Bismarck’s régime. Yet only a little imagination is needed to make them understand that a power which first ingeniously isolated and then struck down Denmark, Austria, and France, in turn, is a power whose future course is bound to be watched with a certain nervousness. In the past forty years, although she has kept the peace, she has done little to dissipate that nervousness. She is still the one centre of disturbance and suspicion on the continent of Europe. Her diplomacy is universally distrusted. Looking to Germany’s past, and to her present needs and strength, can any one, ask Englishmen, regard the era of German expansion as definitely closed? Was Tsushima the last naval battle that will ever be fought? Who believes that the present political arrangements of Europe are final and immutable? What guarantee is there that Austria, or at least Belgium and Holland, may not share the fate of the Elbe Duchies and Alsace-Lorraine?

Look at the map. Germany is an imprisoned empire. With the mouth of the Rhine, the German Tiber, in the hands of strangers, with a small and weak people astride her busiest river, Germany is like a man denied a key to his own front door. She is cut off from the full freedom of the Baltic and the North Sea, from the Mediterranean and from the Adriatic. The short and difficult coast-line between Holland and Denmark forms virtually the sole effective channel for the commerce of this powerful and ambitious nation. And the states — Holland, Denmark, Belgium — that in this way cramp Germany’s development are in all cases weaker than herself. She is walled off by puny, insignificant communities from everything she most vitally needs for the protection of her security and the full utilization of her strength. Ports, territory, opportunities, lie just beyond her boundaries, — boundaries, remember, that are artificial, not permanent; drawn by diplomatists, not by nature, — and their occupation would provide for generations an adequate outlet for her surplus population, her maritime ambitions and her industrial enterprise. Apart, therefore, from the real or fancied claims of race, and apart from the fantasies of the PanGermans, the temptation is a severe one.

But for Germany to attempt to find room by the forcible annexation of Belgium, or Holland, or both; for her to endeavor to plant herself on the mouths of the Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt, would be an act that would argue the very dementia of jingoism. It would mean bringing England and all her neighbors in Europe, except perhaps Austria, down upon her at once. It would mean the instantaneous formation of a coalition to wrest from Germany the preponderance which Europe in the past has denied both to France and Spain. For it is an axiom of European history that whenever any single nation reaches an undue height of power, the other nations combine by instinct against her; and Germany, were she to annex Holland and Belgium, would rouse that instinct to sustained and irresistible action.

Belgium no doubt must figure in German eyes as a highly desirable asset; but the Wilhelmstrasse would assuredly hesitate long, even if there were nothing else to deter it, before it incorporated into the empire another disaffected province, with over two million Catholic electors, and a population that would fight even more tenaciously than the Poles against being Germanized. The conquest of Belgium by Germany is at the worst an infinitely remote contingency, a thing that conceivably might happen if Germany were so carried away by the lust of aggression as to be willing to face all Europe in arms. The true danger that threatens the small nations of northern Europe is, not that they may be conquered and annexed by Germany, but that in the event of a war involving both France and Germany, their neutrality may be violated and their territory partitioned by the victors in the struggle. But merely to state the peril is to see at once how distant and intangible it is, and how little anything that is done to-day is likely to hasten or retard it.

The second possible cause of an Anglo-German conflict lies in Germany’s relations with France, and, to a lesser degree, with Russia. Since Great Britain abandoned her position of ‘ splendid isolation ’ and took to forming alliances and ententes, friendship with France has become the pivot of her European policy. The English proclaim that it is an unaggressive friendship, which threatens no one; that its basis was a mutual desire to make an end of old, unprofitable disputes and jealousies in the sphere of colonial development; and that other nations may fairly be asked to accommodate themselves to it. Equally pacific is the interpretation they place upon their agreement with Russia, their understanding with Spain, and their alliance with Japan.

But the Germans do not accept this reading of the situation. They point out that all these compacts have one feature in common: Germany is excluded from them. They go on to remind themselves that the result of the AngloFrench Agreement of 1904 was to settle the fate of Morocco without consulting Germany and as though Germany had no interest whatever in the Shereefian Empire. They note that a similar result in regard to Persia has followed from the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907. They observe that every sign of the lukewarmness of Italy in supporting her allies of the Triplice is hailed in Great Britain with unconcealed gratification. They accuse the British, in short, of giving anti-German point to their diplomacy, of tampering with the loyalty of Germany’s allies, and of organizing a league of powers with the object of penning Germany in.

It is probably the case, though most Englishmen would deny it, that behind British diplomacy of the past eight years there has been a double motive. The first motive unquestionably was to make an end of the insensate antagonisms that had for so long kept apart England and France, and England and Russia. This was an object that was worth pursuing for itself alone. But while pursuing it, no British statesman could have been blind to the fact that the nearer England drew to France and to Russia, by so much was Germany’s preponderance diminished. The rapprochements with France and Russia, while very far from being in intention a declaration of diplomatic war upon Germany, had very much the air of resembling a clearing of the decks. If they were not aimed at Germany, they were welcomed by British opinion as being, at the least, a precaution against Germany; and that this invested them with a greater attractiveness in the eyes of Downing Street, it would be difficult to deny. But whatever the calculation, if calculation there were, that underlay the new British policy of alliances and ententes, their effects are clear. The Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance face one another to-day in a rivalry as sharp and clean-cut as that of two gladiators in a Roman arena.

Yet there is much in the situation that remains obscure and unsettled. Great Britain has ceased to play her familiar part of neutrality in continental affairs; she is reverting rather to the principles and activities of the Palmerstonian era; but she is doing so with an uncertainty of aim, and an inadequacy in the adaptation of means to ends, that Palmerston himself would hardly have tolerated. Thus she has established what is called an entente with France. But an entente is not an enunciation of policy. It is an indefinite state of mind and feeling; it is a condition of the international atmosphere; it prescribes no course of action, imposes no obligations, formulates no objects to be aimed at, provides against no contingencies, and is therefore liable to be interpreted by different people in different ways. Very few Englishmen would agree as to the precise nature and extent of the liabilities incurred by Great Britain on account of her entente with France. But the attitude of English opinion in 1905, when for a while it seemed as if Germany meant to attack France, was highly significant. It declared in effect that any such enterprise would be resisted by France and Great Britain in common.

There was no warrant for any such declaration, either in the agreement of 1904 or in the mere fact that an entente existed. Nevertheless it embodied a policy which the British government would have had no option but to follow. British opinion had decided that the independence of France was a British interest, to be defended, if need be, at any cost. Under similar circumstances a similar decision would be arrived at to-day, and no government could ignore it or fail to act upon it. That is a very curious situation. Without asking from France anything in return, the British people have virtually engaged themselves to join with her in warding off an unprovoked attack by Germany. There is no evidence to show that the French are prepared to reciprocate in kind.

Yet never perhaps in her whole history was there a time when Great Britain was less equipped for continental warfare than now. She is intervening in the affairs of Europe precisely at the moment when her military resources, compared with those of her possible antagonists, are most manifestly inferior. This disproportion, indeed, between her commitments and her preparations to meet them has powerfully reinforced the agitation, which has long been gathering ground among the more ‘ advanced ’ section of British publicists, for universal military service. Since the security and integrity of France are now enrolled among the objects of British policy, and since these objects can be attained only on land, and not at sea, there is some justification for those who argue that Great Britain must ultimately either resume her old position of independence in Continental rivalries, or adopt conscription, or incur the risk of a humiliating disaster. Meanwhile, in the haziness as to the scope and effectiveness of the Triple Entente, and of Great Britain’s share in it; its weakness both in diplomacy and in military equipment as against the resolution and overwhelming strength displayed by both Germany and Austria-Hungary; the numerical inferiority of France and the distractions of Russia; the suspicions and jealousies that multiply as each nation arms for it knows not what — in all this there is an indisputable menace to the prospects of Anglo-German peace.

But the third cause of a possible conflict between Germany and Great Britain, and the one which most engrosses attention on both sides of the North Sea, is the prodigious expansion of German sea-power. Germany in the past five years has doubled her navy estimates, and though the strain is taxing, and to some extent disorganizing, her finances, there is every sign and every probability that the future will witness still greater increases. She is spending in the current year one hundred and ten million dollars on her fleet; she has already organized the most powerful army the world has ever seen; her coast-line is such as to be almost in itself a protection against attack; her system of administration ensures to all her executive programmes a unique consistency; a defeat at sea touches her at no vital point — Germany, for instance, can never be starved; her navy, admirably disciplined and efficient, has the further advantage of operating practically from a single base; she can build ships as fast and as well as Great Britain; and her people, though grumbling and half in revolt against the increased expenditure, are nevertheless more lightly taxed than the British, and feel within them a vigor and a consciousness of being on the crest of the rising wave that England for the most part has long since lost.

The thoroughness, patience, and prevision which Germany injects into all her undertakings make her a formidable antagonist. But to British eyes she appears particularly formidable. Everything that Great Britain is and may be in the world of material power and competition — her security, her trade, her empire, the very food of her people — depends upon the navy. Losing supremacy at sea, she loses everything. It is clear that the rivals are entering on their naval rivalry with unequal stakes. What ascendancy on the continent of Europe is to Germany, that, and more than that, is ascendancy at sea to Great Britain. To Germans seapower is no more than a useful walkingstick; to Great Britain it is a crutch, without which she falls; and a struggle between the two powers for maritime supremacy would be essentially a struggle on Germany’s part for dominion and on England’s part for life. But that fact alone, vital as it is, does not give the full measure of British apprehensions. German sea-power is massed at a single point — the North Sea; British sea-power is and must be distributed over all the seven seas, and may at any moment — there being nothing that changes so rapidly as the face of international politics — be called upon to meet a crisis in the Mediterranean or the Pacific. Again, the German Navy Department is in the main an executive department, free from parliamentary domination, able to look ahead and prepare; while the British Admiralty is in the main a political department, whose estimates and politics vary with the chances of party warfare, are framed from year to year, and are always liable to be attacked and truncated by that not inconsiderable body of British politicians who regard money spent on armaments as money wasted, and who instinctively set social reform above national security.

Remembering the traditions, the accumulated experience, and the present overwhelming superiority of the British navy, these are handicaps which a dispassionate onlooker might not consider very serious. If Englishmen regard them as portentous, it is partly because British nerves are in a ‘panicky’ condition; partly because Englishmen are secretly conscious that in organized discipline, efficiency, and self-sacrifice, the Germans are ahead of them; and partly because they are not only persuaded that what they possess — colonies, sea-power, a worldwide carrying-trade— is precisely what Germany is ambitious to obtain, but are also penetrated with the conviction that Germany is always on the watch to do them an ill turn. If Englishmen do not actually anticipate a German invasion, they are, on the other hand, by no means assured that the Germans are morally incapable of such an adventure; and comparatively few of them doubt that if they were at war with a first-class power, Germany would side with their adversary. As reasonable Englishmen view it, the danger from the German navy is not so much that it will equal the British navy — though the invention of the Dreadnought, by putting all powers on nearly similar terms and by rendering all other types of ship comparatively obsolete, makes it all but impossible for Great Britain ever to regain her old-time lead — as that it will come to hold the balance of European seapower, and may at some future crisis furnish the spear-head for an anti-British coalition.

At the very least the German fleet introduces a new factor into the naval situation. It makes it proportionately more difficult for Great Britain to maintain that commanding position at sea which her security imperatively demands. It intensifies the competitive stress, and by so much diminishes her margin of safety. It has already forced her to revolutionize her naval dispositions and to concentrate nearly ninety per cent of her maritime strength in the North Sea. It has started one agitation for abandoning the Two-Power standard and for adopting in its place a systematic policy of laying down two keels to Germany’s one; another agitation for floating a naval loan of two hundred and fifty million dollars; a third, for taking the Admiralty out of politics; and it has given an extra stimulus to the movement for national military service. The Germans on their part view the massing of the British navy in the North Sea as the forerunner to a hostile attack. Few things are more discussed in the German press than the possibility of England’s initiating a ‘ preventive war ’ to crush the German navy before it grows too strong. If Englishmen were Germans and if Mr. Asquith were Bismarck, that, no doubt, is how England would act. As it is, nothing of the sort will be attempted. The rivalry will continue without pause or abatement; no agreement to limit armaments is possible, because Germany will never bind herself to accept a permanent inferiority at sea, and no other basis is compatible with British needs; we shall soon find five hundred million dollars a year being spent on naval preparations on the two sides of the North Sea.

It is futile to blame either England or Germany. Theirs is a struggle between right and right, or at least between necessity and necessity. Germany is as fully entitled to have as big a fleet as she pleases, as Great Britain is bound to have a bigger one. Between the opposing policies, needs, and ambitions contained in that single sentence, there can be no compromise. What, then, will be the upshot of it all? France and Germany, though armed to the teeth, have dwelt side by side in peace for forty years. It is possible that Great Britain and Germany may do the same. But it is equally possible that if the financial and atmospheric pressure goes on increasing; if the two nations, while forging these tremendous weapons, continue to glower at each other in mistrust and illwill; if fears and suspicions accumulate and deepen into passionate hatreds, then any one of a hundred conceivable incidents may goad the two peoples beyond endurance and precipitate a violent collision. No one as yet can pretend to say whether the gathering clouds will pass away, or burst in storm and lightning.

But one thing at least is certain: the Anglo-German duel does not concern England and Germany alone. All powers are interested in it, the United States not least. For what is at stake is whether Great Britain and the British Empire and British maritime supremacy are to endure. The destruction of German sea-power as the result of a conflict with England would be an important but hardly a vital event; it would no more ruin Germany than Tsushima ruined Russia; it would but slightly, and for the moment, affect the currents of international politics. The destruction, on the other hand, of the British sea-power, the disappearance of Great Britain as a first-class state, the dissolution of her empire and the rise of Germany to the mistress-ship of the seas, would be developments that would throw the whole world into confusion, and react instantaneously upon the interest and policies of every nation in it. The attitude of other powers toward an issue that contains the possibility of so reverberant a catastrophe may be one of friendliness toward Great Britain or toward Germany, but cannot possibly be one of indifference. Americans in particular will naturally ask themselves whether they are more closely united by bonds of instinctive sympathies, of commerce, and of political interest, to Great Britain or to Germany; whether under present conditions they conceive themselves menaced either in their policies or their pockets by the British Empire or by British naval supremacy; whether, in the event of Germany’s achieving supreme ascendancy at sea, American interests in the Caribbean, in South America, and in the Pacific, would lose or gain; whether, next to the security and wellbeing of their own country, there is any higher American interest than the continuance of the British Empire on its present footing. Such questions to-day fall almost idly on American ears, and the implications concealed in them seem alien and remote to the point of fantasy. Yet the time may be coming when they will be posed with inexorable insistence, and will demand from Americans, whether they wish it or no, a decisive yea or nay.