of an outlet arose for her increasing population and industrial activity, then Germany was compelled to recognise the Kaiser's dictum : Germany's future lies on high seas.'

6

This introduces the political element which is at the root of the Anglo-German problem. Germany perceives the historical fact that England's world-power rests on the invincible strength of her Navy; sea supremacy she accepts as the basic position of England's future, but draws from this the inevitable conclusion that she herself must have wherewith to defend her own interests. Increased efforts in that direction are incumbent upon Germany, and cannot be delayed if she means to meet the future with composure and resolve.

And who can foretell the future?' he argues, where England represents the chief menace; she may decide at the eleventh hour, seeing that she is no longer able to suppress her commercial rivalry, the breaking and destruction of Germany; her glorious naval traditions, when she shattered the sea-power of both Holland and France, are there to give her confidence.

He further complains that German apprehension is intensified by the persistent efforts of English journalism to alarm the English mind and incite it against Germany, in which some of the prominent organs have led the way. The doctrine they are unceasingly spreading is Germaniam esse delendam. Germany is to-day what Spain was under Philip the Second, and France under Louis the Fourteenth and Napoleon-the enemy of England. Even men of authority, such as Lord Cromer and Lord Charles Beresford, though restrainedly, hint at the same disquieting idea.

Germany's design, he says, to invade England, and the assumption of its feasibility is a theoretical supposition that may serve a useful cry in England, but finds no echo in Germany among the recognised naval and military authorities where such conceptions are ridiculed as bogey phantoms.1

Reduced to fact, it would mean that Germany would be obliged to maintain an Army capable of repelling a Franco-Russian attack and simultaneously organise a Navy powerful enough to assume the offensive against England. None save the uninstructed, who may not understand that Germany is a country with relatively poor natural resources, would arrive at these conclusions. Besides, how can these supposed designs of a naval Sedan be reconciled with Bismarck's repeated declaration that only a madman could conceive the possibility of Germany declaring an unprovoked war against England or lending her support to the destruction of the British Empire.'

'This is emphasised in a well-informed article which appeared recently in the German Naval Rundschau'; it demonstrates the impracticability of an attack on England by Germany, and coincides with the views of the best-informed quarters in the German Navy, and the official declarations of the British Defence Committee as advanced by Mr. Balfour.

Economic history, perhaps better than any other medium, vouchsafes the true inwardness of the situation, as the economic problem in effect underlies the foundation of modern Germany, which has largely been built up on a commercially unfenced Great Britain.

The merest allusion to the disappearance of Great Britain as a world-power, Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz meets with scorn. The permanence of the Great British Empire is in his opinion a matter of the very first concern; humanity and civilisation demand it; her benevolent influence has made itself felt among all the coloured races. who are being taught the dignity of labour and, as Hegel so appropriately expresses it, 'Through labour to liberty." An attack upon this magnificent State organism from motives of envy or sordid gain -to use a profound saying of Goethe-' God has it not in Him.'

Germany, however, cannot conceal her apprehensions of England's attitude, who seems to see in Germany's industrial and maritime development a danger to her own trade and sea supremacy. So extreme is the tension that lookers-on discern in this a possible casus belli, in which her Continental allies might be expected to co-operate, and this in spite of the comment of Bismarck, perhaps the most realistic of statesmen, who once said: 'I would never advocate a war to-day for the reason that the enemy may be better armed to-morrow, as no one can foresee the ways of Divine Providence.'

Germans admire the spirit in which England is not prepared to surrender her supremacy that she attained after two hundred years of struggle without the greatest sacrifices towards its maintenance, but all the more watchful must they be of the measures that England may be prepared to adopt against contingencies of rivalry. The concentration of the Channel Fleet in the North Sea, the disposition in England towards introducing the Continental system of universal military service, and the intimate relations that England is cultivating with Germany's powerful neighbours, are all symptoms which the German Empire cannot afford to disregard.

To-day more than 70 per cent. of Germany's trade is set seaward, and a blockade of her harbours would inevitably react disastrously on her industrial system. The chances of starving her by a blockade of her harbours are considered remote, but the experiences of the cholera quarantine in Hamburg, which only lasted two months and cost her 250 million marks, are a reminder of the risks of unpreparedness.

Germany, who cannot view herself exposed to the mercy of any outside Power, insists on an adequate Navy purely as a defensive measure for protecting her food supplies and her foreign trade. The nation, headed by the Emperor and supported by the powerful Navy League, regards the increase of the Navy as a fundamental necessity for maintaining Germany's position as a world-Power.

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The idea has permeated all classes, and is even finding followers in the ranks of the Social Democratic party, whose representative members, Bernstein and Molkenbuhr, for example, are in favour of strengthening the defences of the Empire. On the other hand, in some quarters serious doubt is cast upon Germany's ability to maintain both a strong Army and Navy, seeing her financial difficulties and that her powers of taxation are believed to be exhausted. Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz controverts these arguments, and recommends the Exchequer to the imitation of Great Britain, who has been able to overcome her moments of financial strain from such sources of revenue as the increased taxation of beer, wine, tobacco, and a rise in the succession duties. The financial pressure therefore is in no sense to be regarded as symptomatic of the poor resources of the country, but merely reflects the unwillingness of the people to burden themselves with greater taxation for the benefit of the State as a whole.

The soundness of the above recommendations with regard to German exigencies is perhaps being proved by the fact that Prince Buelow has actually adopted them in dealing with his new Financial Reform Bill, with regard to which the published naval programme may, therefore, be accepted as an irrevocable decision of German policy.

Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz asserts that Germany is within her indisputable right in providing such defences as she may deem necessary, also that England is justified in adopting such measures as may adequately assure her safety.

This need be, according to him, no disturbing factor; he discerns therein the only means of arriving at an inviolable compact and sustained friendliness between the two countries. Not through Germany's weakness but only through her strength can she maintain amicable relations with other countries.

The United States require a Navy for the purpose of defending their oversea interests; and President Roosevelt's words of warning to the Americans, who rule a continent, apply with even greater force to Germany, with her poor soil and overcrowded population:

No decree or other remedy can be invented to save a people who have neglected the primary and foremost national quality, that of being able to defend their hearths and homes from being subjected to the most ruthless ill-treatment. If we wish to avert insults we must have the power to reject them. If we are sincere in our profession of peace it must be general knowledge that we are fully prepared any moment for war. In fact, it is unworthy of a great industrial State to stake its existence on the sufferance of a well-inclined or may-be illdisposed neighbour.

The same concession that England has made to her most formidable rival, the United States, and in no lesser degree to Japan, she should

not deny to Germany, whose only means of defending her vital interests are the identical ones employed by both these countries; moreover even to-day the German Fleet is smaller than that of France, whose interests overseas are, comparatively speaking, artificially produced.

Why, says the writer, should England fear Germany's Fleet when she allows the more powerful American Navy and other naval Powers to have their own way? But the present defensive character of the German Navy, he says, cannot be sufficiently emphasised, if only as a means of dispelling the vain and delusive talk of Germany's supposed designs on the self-governing States that comprise the British Empire. Among others a late African administrator is overtaken with the idea of a German aggression that is calculated to knock out England, and to pass on to the conquest of Africa and Australia; as though Germany, even supposing her ambitions extended in that direction, were insensible to the object-lesson of the South African War, which gave evidence of the impulse which moved the Empire as a whole in the hour of England's trial, and moreover has shown that, with all the overwhelming force of the British Empire against her, South Africa has grown into a nation, and is to-day uniting its forces into a homogeneous whole, an object which Australia and Canada have already succeeded in accomplishing.

Far from this being the case, Germany's Navy has its essential being as constituting a guarantee of peace with England, as a guardian of Germany's oversea trade and interests on which her existence as a first-class Power to-day depends; politically speaking, it is the outward and visible manifestation of Germany's oversea interests and endows the Government with the power of insisting upon equal opportunities for all and the holding back of foreign aggression from certain directions, as for example from any encroachment upon the independent Mohammedan countries of to-day.

Germany's Fleet in fact does not stand for luxury or ambition. It is the necessity of her being, essential as her daily bread, the protection to herself and her children.

Once the conviction is established that did a conflict arise between the two nations, the power of the one would not be sufficient to vanquish the force of the other, and that such a war would be more likely to benefit the outside States rather than themselves, the foundation for a mutual understanding should find permanence. Once the difficulty is surmounted on logical hard facts the economic problem can be adjusted on its own merits and the points of contact are at once established if both sides recognise that the commercial relations of the two countries are inter-dependent, and that the disaster of the one is the misfortune of the other. Germany's interest in the maintenance of the British Empire is self-evident, for the practical reason

that England constitutes one great bulwark of support to her material progress.

England is Germany's best customer, her purchases being far in excess of either those of Austria, America, or Russia as set forth in the following Table:

It is of ultimate importance that Germany should retain this trade; unlike England she has practically no Colonial resources with which to fortify her position from without. England can add to her economic strength inside of her own Imperial domain by uniting her forces, as Mr. Chamberlain has pointed out. Germany has no such reservoirs, and is entirely dependent on foreign markets, which it is incumbent upon her to nurse and foster.

Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz believes that a reversal of England's fiscal system is likely soon to be in operation, the effect of which will be largely to restrict Germany's export trade to England and her oversea States. In some quarters it is suggested that a counterpoise should be found in a Central European Zollverein to checkmate the policy of trade exclusion which the English tariff movement intends to compass, but this idea he rejects as Utopian, as Germany can gain nothing, he thinks, by combative measures, and will do better by pursuing a conciliatory policy to the extent of making, if necessary, substantial sacrifices for the sake of a workable understanding. All the irritation of a petty fiscal warfare, including dumping, &c., so chafing to British producers, should be avoided and desisted from.

To some extent Germany must suffer from any change in England's fiscal system, since she derived her industrial strength largely from Free Trade England, but even such an economic disturbance need neither dismay the German or deliver him over to pessimism.

The closer union of England and her oversea States, says Professor Schulze-Gaevernitz, will probably widen Germany's scope in other markets, such as Russia, South America, and the Far and Near