se, we are! But it's a constant uphill fight; and we
aren't ready. They talk of a two-power standard--' He plunged away
into regions where space forbids me to follow him. This is only a
sample of many similar conversations that we afterwards held, always
culminating in the burning question of Germany. Far from including me
and the Foreign Office among his targets for vague invective, he had
a profound respect for my sagacity and experience as a member of that
institution; a respect which embarrassed me not a little when I
thought of my _precis_ writing and cigarette-smoking, my dancing, and
my dining. But I did know something of Germany, and could satisfy his
tireless questioning with a certain authority. He used to listen rapt
while I described her marvellous awakening in the last generation,
under the strength and wisdom of her rulers; her intense patriotic
ardour; her seething industrial activity, and, most potent of all,
the forces that are moulding modern Europe, her dream of a colonial
empire, entailing her transformation from a land-power to a
sea-power. Impregnably based on vast territorial resources which we
cannot molest, the dim instincts of her people, not merely directed
but anticipated by the genius of her ruling house, our great trade
rivals of the present, our great naval rival of the future, she
grows, and strengthens, and waits, an ever more formidable factor in
the future of our delicate network of empire, sensitive as gossamer
to external shocks, and radiating from an island whose commerce is
its life, and which depends even for its daily ration of bread on the
free passage of the seas.

'And we aren't ready for her,' Davies would say; 'we don't look her
way. We have no naval base in the North Sea, and no North Sea Fleet.
Our best battleships are too deep in draught for North Sea work. And,
to crown all, we were asses enough to give her Heligoland, which
commands her North Sea coast. And supposing she collars Holland;
isn't there some talk of that?'

That would lead me to describe the swollen ambitions of the
Pan-Germanic party, and its ceaseless intrigues to promote the
absorption of Austria, Switzerland, and--a direct and flagrant menace
to ourselves--of Holland.

'I don't blame them,' said Davies, who, for all his patriotism, had
not a particle of racial spleen in his composition. 'I don't blame
them; their Rhine ceases to be German just when it begins to be most
valuable. The mouth is Dutch,