regions of the earth.  According to this view it was in some mysterious way Britain’s fault that France and Germany were not the best of friends, and that Russia had been alienated from her ancient ally.  But the day of reckoning would come when these mean devices would no longer avail, and the pampered, selfish, and overgrown colossus would find herself faced by hard-trained and finely tempered Germany, clad in her shining armour.  Then, at the first shock, India would revolt; and the Dutch of South Africa would welcome their German liberators; and the great colonies, to which Britain had granted a degree of independence that no virile state would ever have permitted, would shake off the last shreds of subordination; and the ramshackle British Empire would fall to pieces; and Germany would emerge triumphant, free to pursue all her great schemes, and to create a lasting world-power, based upon Force and System and upon ‘a healthy egoism,’ not upon ’irrational sentimentalities’ about freedom and justice.

These were the doctrines and calculations of Realpolitik.  They were becoming more and more prevalent in the ’nineties.  They seem definitely to have got the upper hand in the direction of national policy during the last years of the century, when Germany refused to consider the projects of disarmament put forward at the Hague in 1899, when the creation of the German navy was begun by the Navy Acts of 1898 and 1900, and when the Emperor announced that the future of Germany lay upon the water, and that hers must be the admiralty of the Atlantic.  At the moment when the conquest of the world by European civilisation was almost complete, two conceptions of the meaning of empire, the conception of brutal domination pursued for its own sake, which has never been more clearly displayed than in the administration of the German colonies, and the conception of trusteeship, which had slowly emerged during the long development of the British Empire, stood forth already in sharp antithesis.

The dreadful anticipation of coming conflict weighed upon the world.  France, still suffering from the wounds of 1870, was always aware of it.  Russia, threatened by German policy in the Balkans, was more and more clearly realising it.  But Britain was extraordinarily slow to awaken to the menace.  As late as 1898 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was advocating an alliance between Britain, Germany, and America to maintain the peace of the world; and Cecil Rhodes, when he devised his plan for turning Oxford into the training-ground of British youth from all the free nations of the empire, found a place in his scheme for German as well as for American students.  The telegram to President Kruger in 1896 caused only a passing sensation.  The first real illumination came with the extraordinary display of German venom against Britain during the South African war, and with the ominous doubling of the German naval programme adopted in the midst of that war, in 1900.  But even this made no profound impression.  The majority of the British people declined to believe that a ‘great and friendly nation,’ or its rulers, could deliberately enter upon a scheme of such unbridled ambition and of such unprovoked aggression.