such a case left in isolation in days in which isolation had ceased to be “splendid.”  For great as was her navy, it could not have been relied upon as sufficient to protect her adequately against the combined navies of Germany, France, Russia, and Austria, with that of Italy possibly added.  It was the apprehension occasioned by Germany’s warlike policy that made it an unavoidable act of prudence to enter into the Entente.  It was our only means of making our sea power secure and able to protect us against threats of invasions by great Continental armies.  The Emperor and his Chancellor should therefore have thought of some other way of securing the peace than that of trying to detach us from the Entente.

The alternative was obvious.  Germany should have offered to cease to pile up armaments, if our desire for friendly relations all round could be so extended as to bring all the Powers belonging to both groups into them, along with England.  But the German policy of relying on superior strength in armaments as the true guarantee of peace did not admit of this.  I am no admirer of the principle of the balance of power.  I should like to say good-bye to it.  I prefer the principle of a League of Nations, if that be practicable, or, at the very least, of an Entente comprising all the Powers.  But if neither of these alternatives be possible there remains, for the people who desire to be secure, only the method of the balance of power.  Now Germany drove us to this by her indisposition to change her traditional policy and to be content to rely on the settlement of specific differences for the good feeling that always tends to result.  She had, it is true, the misfortune for so strong a nation to have been born a hundred years too late.  She had got less in Africa than she might have had.  We were ready to help her to a place in the sun there and elsewhere in the world, and to give up something for this end, if only we could secure peace and contentment on her part.  But she would not have it so, and she chose to follow the principle of relying on the “Mailed Fist.”  Of this policy, when pursued recklessly, Bismarck well understood the danger.  “Prestige politics,” as he called them, he hated.  In February, 1888, he laid down in a well-known speech what he held to be the true principle.  “Every Great Power which seeks to exert pressure on the politics of other countries, and to direct affairs outside the sphere of interest which God has assigned to it, carries on politics of power, and not of interest; it works for prestige.”  But that principle was not consistently followed by William the Second.  Into the detailed story of his departure from it I have not space to enter.  But those who wish to follow this will do well to read the narrative contained in an admirable and open-minded book by Mr. Harbutt Dawson, “The German Empire from 1867 to 1914,” in the second volume of which the story is told in detail.