It was natural, perhaps inevitable, that a nation with the history of the German nation, with its ruling ideas, and with its apparently well-tried confidence in the power of its government to achieve its ends by force, should readily accept such a programme.  The date at which this programme captured the government of Germany, and became the national policy, can be quite clearly fixed:  it was in 1890, when Bismarck, the ‘no colony man,’ was driven from power, and the supreme direction of national affairs fell into the hands of the Emperor William II.  An impressionable, domineering and magniloquent prince, inflated by the hereditary self-assurance of the Hohenzollerns, and sharing to the full the modern German belief in German superiority and in Germany’s imperial destiny, William II. became the spokesman and leader of an almost insanely megalomaniac, but terribly formidable nation.  During the first decade of his government the new ambitions of Germany were gradually formulated, and became more distinct.  They were not yet very apparent to the rest of the world, in spite of the fact that they were expounded with vigour and emphasis in a multitude of pamphlets and books.  The world was even ready to believe the Emperor’s assertion that he was the friend of peace:  he half believed it himself, because he would have been very ready to keep the peace if Germany’s ‘rights’ could be attained without war.  But many episodes, such as Kiao-Chau, and the Philippines, and the ceaseless warfare in the German colonies, and the restless enterprises of Pan-German intrigue, provided a commentary upon these pretensions which ought to have revealed the dangerous spirit which was conquering the German people.

It is difficult, in the midst of a war forced upon the world by German ambition, to take a sane and balanced view of the aims which German policy was setting before itself during these years of experiment and preparation.  What did average German opinion mean by the phrase Weltmacht, world-power, which had become one of the commonplaces of its political discussions?  We may safely assume that by the mass of men the implications of the term were never very clearly analysed; and that, if they had been analysable, the results of the analysis would have been widely different in 1890 and in 1914, except for a few fanatics and extremists.  Was the world-power at which Germany was aiming a real supremacy over the whole world?  In a vague way, no doubt, important bodies of opinion held that such a supremacy was the ultimate destiny of Germany in the more or less distant future; and the existence of such a belief, however undefined, is important because it helped to colour the attitude of the German mind towards more immediately practical problems of national policy.  But as a programme to be immediately put into operation, world-power was not conceived in this sense by any but a few Pan-German fanatics; and even they would have recognised that of course