would be all that was
required. Before I left Berlin the Emperor, as I mentioned in the
preceding chapter, handed to me, with friendly frankness and with
permission to show it to my colleagues, an advance copy of the new Bill.
It looked to me as if, when scrutinized, its proposals might prove more
formidable than we had anticipated. But I asked his permission to
abstain from trying to form any judgment on this question without the
aid of the British Admiralty, and I put it in my pocket and handed it to
the First Lord of the Admiralty at a Cabinet held on Monday, February
12, in the afternoon of the day on which I returned to London. I was not
very sure as to what might prove to be contained in this Bill, and my
misgivings were confirmed by our Admiralty experts, who found in it a
program of destroyers, submarines, and personnel far in excess of
anything indicated in the only rumors that had reached us. After we had
to abandon the idea of getting Germany to accept the carefully guarded
formula of neutrality which was all that we could entertain, the Cabinet
sanctioned without delay the additions to our navy which were required
to counter these increases. Our policy was to avoid conflagration by
every effort possible, and at the same time to insure the house in case
of failure.

I felt throughout these conversations that the Chancellor was sincerely
desirous of meeting me in the effort to establish good relations between
the two countries. But he was hampered by the difficulty of changing the
existing policy of building up armaments which was imposed on him. In
only one way could he manage this, and that was by getting me to agree
to a formula of absolute neutrality under all circumstances. The other,
the better, and the only way that was admissible for us, the way in
which we had surmounted all difficulties with France and Russia, he was
not free to enter on, tho I believe that he really wished to. Hence the
attempt at a complete agreement failed. But, as he says himself, much
good came of these initial conversations, and still more of the
subsequent conversations which followed on them in London between Sir
Edward Grey and the German Ambassador. Candor became the order of the
day, minor difficulties were smoothed over, and a treaty for territorial
rearrangements, of the general character discussed in Berlin, was
finally agreed on, and was likely to have been signed had the war not
intervened.

As to the rest of the n