and led them to form tentative and conditional arrangements for defence in case of attack.  This is all that was meant by the Triple Entente.  It formed a loose pendant to the Dual Alliance between France and Russia, which was binding and solid.  With those Powers the United Kingdom formed separate agreements; but they were not alliances; they were friendly understandings on certain specific objects, and in no respect threatened the Triple Alliance so long as it remained non-aggressive[521].

[Footnote 519:  See the cynical section in Reventlow, op. cit. (pp. 280-8), entitled “Utopien und Intrigen im Haag.”  For Austria’s efforts to prevent the Anglo-Russian Entente, see H.W.  Steed, The Hamburg Monarchy, p. 230.]

[Footnote 520:  Rachfahl (p. 307) admits this, but accuses England of covert opposition everywhere, even at the Hague Conference.]

[Footnote 521:  On December 24, 1908, the Russian Foreign Minister, Izvolsky, assured the Duma that “no open or secret agreements directed against German interests existed between Russia and England.”]

One question remains.  When was it that the friction between Great Britain and Germany first became acute?  Some have dated it from the Morocco Affair of 1905-6.  The assertion is inconsistent with the facts of the case.  Long before that crisis the policy of the Kaiser tended increasingly towards a collision.  His patronage of the Boers early in 1896 was a threatening sign; still more so was his World-Policy, proclaimed repeatedly in the following years, when the appointments of Tirpitz and Buelow showed that the threats of capturing the trident, and so forth, were not mere bravado.  The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, followed quickly by the Kaiser’s speech at Hamburg, and the adoption of accelerated naval construction in 1900, brought about serious tension, which was not relaxed by British complaisance respecting Samoa.  The coquetting with the Sultan, the definite initiation of the Bagdad scheme (1902-3), and the completion of the first part of Germany’s new naval programme in 1904 account for the Anglo-French Entente of that year.  The chief significance of the Morocco Affair of 1905-6 lay in the Kaiser’s design of severing that Entente.  His failure, which was still further emphasised during the Algeciras Conference, proved that a policy which relies on menace and ever-increasing armaments arouses increasing distrust and leads the menaced States to form defensive arrangements.  That is also the outstanding lesson of the career of Napoleon I. Nevertheless, the Kaiser, like the Corsican, persisted in forceful procedure, until Army Bills, Navy Bills, and the rejection of pacific proposals at the Hague, led to their natural result, the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907.  This event should have made him question the wisdom of relying on armed force and threatening procedure.  The Entente between the Tsar and the Campbell-Bannerman Administration