ect lesson
in the advantages of discretion.

Discussion of the Tweedmouth letter had hardly ceased when the whole
question of the "personal regiment" was again, and as it now, five
years after, appears, finally thrashed out between the Emperor and his
folk. Before, however, considering the _Daily Telegraph_ interview and
the Emperor's part in it, something should be said as to the state of
international ill-feeling which caused him to sanction its
publication.

The ill-feeling was no sudden wave of hostility or pique, but a
sentiment which had for years existed in the minds of both nations--a
sentiment of mutual suspicion. The Englishman thought Germany was
prepared to dispute with him the maritime supremacy of Great Britain,
the German that England intended to attack Germany before Germany
could carry her great design into execution. The proximate cause of
the irritation--for it has not yet got beyond that--was the decision,
as announced in her Navy Law of 1898, to build a fleet of battleships
which Germany, but especially the Emperor, considered necessary to
complete the defences, and appropriate for affirming the dignity, of
the Empire.

This was the _origo_, but not the _fons_. The source was the Boer War
and the Kruger telegram, though the philosophic historian might with
some reason refer it in a large measure also to the surprise and
uneasiness with which the leading colonial and commercial, as well as
maritime, nation of the world saw the material progress, the waxing
military power, and the longing for expansion of the not yet
forty-year-old German Empire. Forty years ago the word "Germany" had
no territorial, but only a descriptive and poetical, significance;
certainly it had no political significance; for the North German
Union, out of which the modern German Empire grew, meant for
Englishmen, and indeed for politicians everywhere, only Prussia.
Prussia was less liked by the world then than she is now, when she is
not liked too well; and accordingly there was already in existence the
disposition in England to criticize sharply the conduct of Prussia and
to apply the same criticism to the Empire Prussia founded. In this
condition of international feeling England's long quarrel with the
Transvaal Republic came nearer to the breaking-point; at the same time
there was an idea prevalent in England that Germany was coquetting
with the Boers--if not looking to a seizure of Transvaal territory, at
least hoping f