and are dependent for our food and our raw
materials on our being able to protect their transport and with it
ourselves from invasion, could not permit the sea-protection which had
been recognized from generation to generation as a necessity for our
preservation to be threatened by the creation of naval forces intended
to make it precarious. As the navies of Europe were growing, not only
those of France and Russia, but the navy of Italy also, we had to look,
in the interests of our security, to friendly relations with these
countries. We aimed at establishing such friendly relations, and our
method was to get rid of all causes of friction, in Newfoundland, in
Egypt, in the East, and in the Mediterranean. That was the policy which
was implied in our Ententes. We were not willing to enter into military
alliances and we did not do so. Our policy was purely a business policy,
and everything else was consequential on this, including the growing
sense of common interests and of the desire for the maintenance of
peace. I do not think that Admiral Tirpitz wanted actual war. But he did
want power to enforce submission to the expansion of Germany at her
will. And this power was his means to the end which was what less
Prussianized minds in Germany contemplated as attainable in less
objectionable ways. Such a means he could not fashion in the form of
strength in sea power which would have placed us at his mercy, without
arousing our instinct for self-preservation.

All this the late Imperial Chancellor in substance ignores. The fact is
that he can only defend his theory on the hypothesis that no such policy
as that of his colleague was on foot, and that the truth was that
France, Russia, and England had come to a decision to take the
initiative in a policy embracing, for France revenge for the loss of
Alsace and Lorraine, for Russia the acquisition of Constantinople with
domination over the Balkans and the Bosporus, and for England the
destruction of German commerce. If this hypothesis be not true, and the
real explanation of the alarm of the Entente Powers was the policy
exemplified by Tirpitz and the other exponents of German militarism,
then the whole of the reasoning in Herr von Bethmann Hollweg's book
falls to the ground.

It may be asked how it was possible that two members of the Imperial
Government should have been pursuing in the same period two policies
wholly inconsistent with each other. The answer is not difficult. T