and warnings—­and not without contumely and abuse for my person—­how differently could we not have promoted our growing trade and our interests beyond the sea!”

Perhaps; but perhaps, too, it was as well for the peace of the world that Germany had no great war fleet during those eight years of troubled international relations, and that the gentle and adjusting hand of Providence, not the mailed fist of the Emperor, was guiding the destinies of nations.

Previous to the opening of the reign a German navy can hardly be said to have existed.  Yet it should not be forgotten that Germany also has maritime traditions of no small interest, if of no great importance, to the world.  The Great Elector, the ancestor of the Emperor who ruled Brandenburg from 1640 to 1688, was fully conscious of the profit his people might acquire by sea commerce, and the little navy of high-sea frigates which he built stood manfully, and often successfully, up to the more powerful navies of Sweden and Spain.  This fleet was known, too, far away from Brandenburg, for the records tell how the Pope and the Maltese Knights and Louis XIV willingly admitted it to their harbours.

But there was lacking what until lately has always hemmed German progress—­money; and the commercially-minded Dutch, a people themselves with many German characteristics, kept the Germans from the sea.  Then came Frederick the Great, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, and those Germans who are fond of claiming Shakespeare for their own will also tell you that the plan drawn up by Frederick for Pitt’s seven years’ struggle with France—­that plan so unfortunately imitated afterwards by the Emperor in his correspondence with Queen Victoria during the Boer War—­was the foundation-stone of British naval supremacy!  Frederick, too, saw the advantage of possessing a fleet, but he had his hands full with France and Russia, and reluctantly had to decline the offer of the French naval hero, Labourdonnais, to build him a battle-fleet.  At this period, and in the Great Elector’s time, Emden was the Plymouth of Prussia.  When Frederick died, there followed that time of which Germans themselves are ashamed—­the hole-and-corner time, the time when the parochial spirit was abroad and no German burgher saw beyond the village church and the village pump; the Biedermeier time (that comic figure of the German Punch), the time of genuine German philistinism, when the people were lapped in an idyllic repose and were content, as many are to-day, with the smallest and simplest pleasures.

This spirit continued until the early quarter of the nineteenth century, when Professor Frederick List roused the attention of his countrymen, and notably that of Bismarck, to the necessity of an independent national existence and a national economic policy.  In 1836 a committee recommended naval coast protection, but it was not until 1848, when Denmark blockaded the German coast, that anything was done to provide