William II. and his Naval Minister
The German Fleet, as it is to-day, may be regarded as the work of two men—the Emperor William II. and Admiral von Tirpitz.
Even for those who have lived long in Germany, it is difficult to form a judgment as to the aims and motives of the Emperor William's naval policy, and of the part which he has played in its carrying out. With regard to their sovereign, Germans are inclined to fly to one of two extremes; according to the class to which they belong, they represent him either as a heaven-born genius of universal gifts, or as a busybody whose meddlesomeness is rendered specially mischievous by mediæval delusions as to the functions of monarchs and their relations to the Deity. Everything that he does or says is set down as quite right by the one party and as quite wrong by the other. Moreover, the opinions of those brought into closest contact with him are vitiated by the prevalence of a type of sycophancy which is fortunately becoming extinct in other countries.
The patriotic German, who is familiar with his country's history, knows that, five or six hundred years ago, his forefathers monopolized the markets and policed the seas of Northern and Western Europe. He realizes keenly that Germany's maritime and industrial progress was first checked, and then retarded for centuries, by political division and internecine and foreign wars. Possibly he still remembers that great crescendo of victory in which Prussia smothered Denmark, then overthrew Austria in a single battle, and finally, at the head of the kindred Teutonic States, humbled France in the dust, and welded Germany together in one indivisible whole. Even if he does not remember it as part of his own personal experience, all its vivid and stimulating episodes have been a thousand times impressed upon his mind by schoolmaster, politician, historian, and journalist. That after this tremendous martial achievement he should regard his country as the mistress of the continent of Europe is no matter for surprise. But he sees, too, that the Germany of Luther and Goethe, of Ranke, Liebig, Helmholz, and Mommsen, of Bismarck and Moltke, has become also the Germany of Krupp, Siemens, Rathenau, Ballin, and Gwinner; that the products of German industry, the fruits of an unexampled application of the discoveries of science to the processes of manufacture, have been carried by German ships to the remotest ends of the earth; that the material prosperity of his country has been advancing in every direction by leaps and bounds. And he thus believes Germany to be strong, wise, and wealthy, and in every way fitted to stand at the head of mankind. But in one respect he has felt, to his bitter mortification, that she is powerless. Wherever he goes on the world's oceans, he is confronted by those iron walls of Great Britain, which mean that he is there only by the sufferance of one who is immeasurably stronger than himself.
The German patriot has never realized that no efforts on the part of Germany could materially alter the balance of sea-power to her advantage as against Great Britain, and that she would be compelled to fight for her pretensions long before she was in a position to give battle on anything like equal terms. He has believed that the British nation is unnerved and effete, that it has lost both its martial and industrial vigour, that its energies have been sapped by too much wealth and prosperity, and that it is rapidly following the downward path. Finally, he is convinced that the British Parliament, under the influence of an aggressive democracy, exclusively concerned with its own immediate material needs, is losing the capacity to realize and grapple with the larger problems of international politics, and that the Cabinets proceeding from it will, in timorous anxiety, procrastinate and vacillate till it is too late to strike. In this idea he has been only confirmed by the pacifist movement in Great Britain, by the British agitation for disarmament by international agreement, and by the well-meant but unfortunate attempt of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to effect by example what much amiable precept had done nothing to accomplish. These phenomena he has looked upon not as evidence of good-will and peaceableness, but as symptoms of physical, moral, and financial exhaustion.
Such was the view of many in Germany to whom we cannot fairly deny the name of "patriot" if we are to claim it for an analogous disposition among ourselves. It was the view almost universally held by the officers of the German Army and Navy, and, with certain qualifications and reservations, it may be said to have been the view of the Emperor William. This will be evident if, with the help of his many spoken and written utterances, we attempt to follow the main lines which, with many sudden and violent deviations, his thought has taken on this subject. He has, for example, in his speeches repeatedly dwelt on the power and renown of the Hanse League—"one of the mightiest undertakings that the world has ever seen," which "was able to raise fleets such as the broad back of the sea had probably never borne up to that time," which "won such high prestige for the German name abroad," which "created markets for the German industrial regions," and which "only failed because it lacked the support of a strong united Empire obedient to a single will." At Hamburg, in June, 1911, he used these words: "I have only acted historically, for I said to myself on my accession, that the tasks which the Hansa attempted to solve by itself, and which it could not solve because the strong Empire was not at its back, and the defensive and executive power of the Empire did not exist, must unquestionably at once fall on the shoulders of the newly-arisen German Empire; and it was simply the obligations of old traditions that had to be resumed." It was in one former Hanse town that the Emperor spoke the familiar words, "Our future lies on the water"; in another that he declared "The trident should be in our hand"; in a third that he uttered the appeal, "We have bitter need of a strong German Fleet."
Again, he has repeatedly extolled the Great Elector—"the one among my ancestors for whom I have the most enthusiasm, who has from my earliest youth shone before me as a bright example," who, "looking far ahead, carried on politics on a large scale, as they are carried on to-day." In his great speech at Bremen in 1905, the Emperor said: "When as a youth I stood before the model of Brommy's ship, I felt with burning indignation the outrage that was then done to our fleet and our flag"; and these words undoubtedly referred to the injudiciously-phrased note in which Palmerston threatened that vessels which undertook belligerent operations under the colours of that greater German Empire, which then was not and was never to be, would render themselves liable to be treated as "pirates." The present realities of sea-power had been early revealed to him when, as he told the officers on board a British flag-ship in the Mediterranean, he "was running about Portsmouth Dockyard as a boy"; and, as he said in a speech made during the visit of King Edward to Kiel in 1904, "the stupendous activity on the sea at the headquarters of the greatest navy in the world impressed itself indelibly on his youthful mind," and made him, "as Regent, endeavour to realize on a scale corresponding to the conditions of his country what he had seen as a young man in England."