What was the purpose of the building of the German Navy?  The German official answer is that its purpose was the protection of German trade.  “We are now vulnerable at sea,” says Prince Buelow.  “We have entrusted millions to the ocean, and with these millions, the weal and woe of many of our countrymen.  If we had not in good time provided protection for them ... we should have been exposed to the danger of having one day to look on defencelessly while we were deprived of them.  We should have been placed in the position of being unable to employ and support a considerable number of our millions of inhabitants at home.  The result would have been an economic crisis which might easily attain the proportions of a national catastrophe.”

These words may yet prove prophetic.  But the catastrophe will not be the result of Germany’s lack of a Navy; it will be the result of challenging the naval supremacy of Great Britain.

Prince Buelow’s argument assumes, as a basis, the hostility of Great Britain.  This assumption, as we know, was unjustified; and its persistence in the German mind can only be set down to an uneasy conscience.  The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible for Germany or for any other Power successfully to defend her foreign trade in case of war with Great Britain.  No other Power thinks it necessary to attempt to do so, for no other Power has reason to desire or to foresee a naval conflict with Great Britain.

Ever since 1493, when the Pope divided the monopoly of traffic on the ocean between Spain and Portugal, and English mariners flouted his edict, Great Britain has stood for the policy of the Open Sea, and there is no likelihood of our abandoning it.  The German official theory of the purpose of their Navy, with its suspicious attitude towards British sea-power, was, in effect, a bid for supremacy, inspired by the same ideas which made the German army, under Bismarck, supreme in Central Europe.  The Kaiser’s speeches on naval matters, notably his famous declaration that “our future is on the water,” provide an official confirmation, if one were needed, of the real nature of Germany’s naval ambitions.

But what right, it may be asked, has Great Britain to this naval supremacy?  Why should we, more than any other Power, claim one of the elements for our own?  Has not Germany some reason to be jealous?  Why should we not allow her, together with ourselves, “a place on the Ocean”?

The answer to this lies in the character of the British Empire.  One quarter of the human race live under the Union Jack, scattered throughout the oceans and controlled from a small island in the Western seas.  For Great Britain, alone among the States of the world, naval supremacy, and nothing less, is a daily and hourly necessity.  India realised this truth recently in a flash when, after generations of silent protection by British sea-power, German shells fell one night at Madras.  Any Power that challenges the naval