efinitely put into operation during the
decade 1890-1900. Germany was as yet feeling the way, preparing the
ground, and building up her resources both military and industrial.
Perhaps the main result which emerged from the tentative experiments of
these years was that at every point the obstacle was the sprawling
British Empire, and the too-powerful British fleet. The conviction grew
that the overthrow of this fat and top-heavy colossus was the necessary
preliminary to the creation of the German world-state.

This was a doctrine which had long been preached by the chief political
mentor of modern Germany, Treitschke, who died in 1896. He was never
tired of declaring that Britain was a decadent and degenerate state,
that her empire was an unreal empire, and that it would collapse before
the first serious attack. It would break up because it was not based
upon force, because it lacked organisation, because it was a medley of
disconnected and discordant fragments, worshipping an undisciplined
freedom. That it should ever have come into being was one of the
paradoxes of history; for it was manifestly not due to straightforward
brute force, like the German Empire; and the modern German mind could
not understand a state which did not rest upon power, but upon consent,
which had not been built up, like Prussia, by the deliberate action of
government, but which had grown almost at haphazard, through the
spontaneous activity of free and self-governing citizens. Treitschke
and his disciples could only explain the paradox by assuming that since
it had not been created by force, it must have been created by low
cunning; and they invented the theory that British statesmen had for
centuries pursued an undeviating and Machiavellian policy of keeping
the more virile states of Europe at cross-purposes with one another by
means of the cunning device called the Balance of Power, while behind
the backs of these tricked and childlike nations Britain was meanly
snapping up all the most desirable regions of the earth. According to
this view it was in some mysterious way Britain's fault that France and
Germany were not the best of friends, and that Russia had been
alienated from her ancient ally. But the day of reckoning would come
when these mean devices would no longer avail, and the pampered,
selfish, and overgrown colossus would find herself faced by
hard-trained and finely tempered Germany, clad in her shining armour.
Then, at the first s