helped him, and of how he contrived to enlist the Press, is as interesting as it is significant.  But his great difficulty was obviously with William the Second.  The Emperor had done much for fleet construction, and was so interested in it that he meddled at every turn in technical and strategical matters alike.  The Ministry of Marine was not allowed to carry out the Admiral’s own plans and conceptions.  And when Bethmann came on the scene the situation became, according to the former, even worse.  He moans over the apparent limitlessness of the money and authority with which the English Admiralty was provided by Parliament and the nation.  At last he carried with his colleagues and in the Reichstag the policy of Fleet Laws, under which the Reichstag passed measures which took construction, in part at least, from off the annual navy vote, and he got through the succession of Acts that laid down programs extending over several years.  Richter and other distinguished public men fought Tirpitz over these, but, in part at least, he got his way, and secured the nearest approach to continuity that his ever-supervising Sovereign would permit to him.

What Tirpitz says he asked for above everything was a definite policy for war, and this he could not get the leave of Bethmann to lay down, nor could he get the volatile Emperor to stick to definite conceptions of it.  For coast defense he had a supreme contempt.  The great German Army would take care of this, so far as invasion was concerned, and an adequate battle-fleet would do the rest.  It is noticeable that apparently he never even dreamed of trying to invade England with her fleet protection.  It was in quite another way that he intended, if necessary, to harass this country.  He wanted to threaten our commerce and to be able to break any blockade of Germany.  German sea-power was to be made strong enough to attract allies by its ability to rally all free nations without any curatorship by the Anglo-Saxons.

This is what he says his war objectives were.  He bitterly complains of the opposition to them and to himself which he met with from such papers as the Frankfurter Zeitung, and from the influence of certain of his colleagues.  Constitutionalism he appears to have hated.  The democracy of Germany was not suited to such leading as Lloyd George, during the war, gave to England, and Clemenceau to France.  In Germany, he declares, a strong hand is always required, and a revolution is inevitable in case the hand is weak, and defeat follows.  For Germany needed “the Prussian-German State.”  The tradition of Frederick the Great and Bismarck was its protecting spirit.