On 18 February, 1905, the Belgian Minister in Berlin reported thus:
The real cause of the English hatred of Germany is the jealousy aroused by the astonishing development of Germany's merchant navy and of her commerce and manufactures. This hatred will last until the English have thoroughly learned to understand that the world's trade is not by rights an exclusively English monopoly. Moreover, it is studiously fostered by the Times and a whole string of other daily papers and periodicals that do not stop short of calumny in order to pander to the tastes of their readers.
At that time the centre of the English navy had just been shifted to the North Sea, to the accompaniment of a very disturbing and, as at first reported, a very flamboyant speech from the Civil Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Lee. Of the sensation thereby created in Germany, the Belgian Minister says:
In informing the British public that Germany does not dream of any aggression against England, Count Bülow [the German Chancellor] said no more than what is recognized by every one who considers the matter dispassionately. Germany would have nothing to gain from a contest.... The German fleet has been created with a purely defensive object. The small capacity of the coal-bunkers in her High Seas Fleet, and the small number of her cruisers, prove besides that her fleet is not intended for use at any distance from the coast.
On the other hand, he remarks in the same report:
It was obvious that the new disposition of the English navy was aimed at Germany ... it certainly is not because of Russia, whose material stock is to a great extent destroyed and whose navy has just given striking proof of incompetence [in the Russo-Japanese war].
Such is the tone uniformly adopted by these neutral observers throughout their reports from 1905 to 1914. On 24 October, 1905, the Belgian Minister in Paris wrote:
England, in her efforts to maintain her supremacy and to hinder the development of her great German rival, is evidently inspired by the wish to avoid a conflict, but are not her selfish aims in themselves bringing it upon us?... She thought, when she concluded the Japanese alliance and gradually drew France into similar ties, that she had found the means to her end, by sufficiently paralysing Germany's powers as to make war impossible.
This view of the Anglo-Japanese alliance is interesting and significant, especially now when that instrument is coming up for renewal, with the United States standing towards England in the same relation of economic competitorship that Germany occupied in 1905. True, Viscount Bryce assured the Institute of Politics at Williams College last summer that it was not Germany's economic rivalry that disturbed England; but on this point it would be highly advantageous for the people of the United States, while there is yet time, to read what the Belgian Minister in Berlin had to say on 27 October, 1905: