The German Foreign Office officially announced that “in his letter the Emperor merely corrected certain erroneous views prevalent in England regarding the development of the German fleet.”

Readers are now in a position to judge for themselves the accuracy of these statements.  It should be remembered that the reduced navy estimates of 1908-9 were followed by national alarm and the publication of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford’s shipbuilding programme and large increase in estimates of the following year.  Here is the letter: 

The Kaiser’s Letter.

     Berlin, 14th-2, 1908.

My Dear Lord Tweedmouth—­May I intrude on your precious time and ask for a few moments’ attention to these lines I venture to submit to you?  I see by the daily papers and reviews that a battle royal is being fought about the needs of the navy.  I therefore venture to furnish you with some information anent the German naval programme, which it seems is being quoted by all parties to further their ends by trying to frighten peaceable British taxpayers with it as a bogy.

During my last pleasant visit to your hospitable shores I tried to make your authorities understand what the drift of German naval policy is, but I am afraid that my explanations have been either misunderstood or not believed, because I see “German danger” and “German challenge to British naval supremacy” constantly quoted in different articles.  This phrase, if not repudiated or corrected, sown broadcast over the country and daily dinned into British ears, might in the end create the most deplorable results.

I therefore deem it advisable, as Admiral of the Fleet, to lay some facts before you to enable you to see clearly that it is absolutely nonsensical and untrue that the German naval bill is to provide a navy meant as a challenge to British naval supremacy.  The German fleet is built against nobody at all; it is solely built for Germany’s needs in relation with that country’s rapidly growing trade.  The German naval bill was sanctioned by the Imperial Parliament and published ten years ago, and may be had at any large bookseller’s.  There is nothing surprising, secret, or underhand in it, and every reader may study the whole course mapped out for the development of the German Navy with the greatest ease.

Thirty to Forty Battleships in 1920.

The law is being adhered to, and provides for about thirty to forty ships of the line in 1920.  The number of ships fixed by the bill included the fleet then actually in commission, notwithstanding its material being already old and far surpassed by contemporary types.  In other foreign navies the extraordinary rapidity with which improvements were introduced in types of battleships, armaments, and armor made the fleet in commission obsolete before the building programme providing additions to it was half finished.