hock, India would revolt; and the Dutch of South
Africa would welcome their German liberators; and the great colonies,
to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile
state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of
subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces;
and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great
schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and
System and upon 'a healthy egoism,' not upon 'irrational
sentimentalities' about freedom and justice.

These were the doctrines and calculations of Realpolitik. They were
becoming more and more prevalent in the 'nineties. They seem definitely
to have got the upper hand in the direction of national policy during
the last years of the century, when Germany refused to consider the
projects of disarmament put forward at the Hague in 1899, when the
creation of the German navy was begun by the Navy Acts of 1898 and
1900, and when the Emperor announced that the future of Germany lay
upon the water, and that hers must be the admiralty of the Atlantic. At
the moment when the conquest of the world by European civilisation was
almost complete, two conceptions of the meaning of empire, the
conception of brutal domination pursued for its own sake, which has
never been more clearly displayed than in the administration of the
German colonies, and the conception of trusteeship, which had slowly
emerged during the long development of the British Empire, stood forth
already in sharp antithesis.

The dreadful anticipation of coming conflict weighed upon the world.
France, still suffering from the wounds of 1870, was always aware of
it. Russia, threatened by German policy in the Balkans, was more and
more clearly realising it. But Britain was extraordinarily slow to
awaken to the menace. As late as 1898 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was
advocating an alliance between Britain, Germany, and America to
maintain the peace of the world; and Cecil Rhodes, when he devised his
plan for turning Oxford into the training-ground of British youth from
all the free nations of the empire, found a place in his scheme for
German as well as for American students. The telegram to President
Kruger in 1896 caused only a passing sensation. The first real
illumination came with the extraordinary display of German venom
against Britain during the South African war, and with the ominous
doubling of the German naval pr