It remains only to sketch the main features of German history in later years. In spite of the denunciation by the Social Democratic leaders of what they stigmatized as a “policy of brag,” the general popularity of the idea of establishing Naval Progress. a strong sea power was proved by the rapid extension of the Navy League, which in 1904 had already 3595 branches. For an increase in the navy there was, indeed, sufficient excuse in the enormous expansion of German oversea commerce and the consequent growth of the mercantile marine; the value of foreign trade, which in 1894 was £365,000,000, had risen in 1904 to £610,000,000, and in the same period the tonnage of German merchant shipping had increased by 234%. In the session of 1901 Admiral von Tirpitz, the minister of marine, admitted in answer to a Socialist interpellation that the naval programme of 1900 would have to be enlarged. In 1903 Count Bülow declared in the Reichstag that the government was endeavouring to pursue a middle course between “the extravagant aspirations of the Pan-Germans and the parochial policy of the Social Democrats, which forgets that in a struggle for life and death Germany’s means of communication might be cut off.” At the same time the emperor presented to the Reichstag a comparative table, drawn up by his own hand, showing the relative strength of the British and German navies. An inspired article in the Grenzboten declared the object of this to be to moderate at once the aggressive attitude of the Pan-Germans towards Great Britain and British alarms at the naval development of Germany. This gave a fresh impetus to the naval agitation and counter-agitation. In 1904 Count Bülow again found it necessary, in reply to the Socialist leader Bebel, to declare that the German naval armaments were purely defensive. “I cannot conceive,” he said, “that the idea of an Anglo-German war should be seriously entertained by sensible people in either country.” On the 16th of November 1905 a new Navy Bill amplifying the programme of 1900 was accepted by the Federal Diet. The Navy League, encouraged by its success, now redoubled its exertions and demanded that the whole programme should be completed by 1912 instead of 1917. Bebel denounced this agitation as obviously directed against England; and the government thought it expedient to disavow the action of its too zealous allies. A telegram addressed by the emperor William to the presidents of the League, Generals Keim and Menges, led to their resignation; but the effect of this was largely counteracted by the presence of Prince Henry of Prussia and the king of Württemberg at the annual congress of the League at Stuttgart in May, while at the Colonial Congress in the autumn the necessity for a powerful navy was again one of the main themes of discussion. That the government was, in fact, at one with the League as to the expediency of pushing on the naval programme was proved by the revelations of the first lord of the admiralty, Mr McKenna, in the debate on the naval estimates in the British parliament of 1909. From these it was clear that the German government had for some time past been pressing on its naval armaments with little regard to the ostensible programme, and that in the matter of the newest types of battleships, Great Britain had to reckon with the fact that, before the date fixed for the completion of the programme, Germany might establish at least an equality.
The same determined spirit which characterized German naval policy was evident also in her relations with the other powers. The suspicions as to the stability of the Triple Alliance produced, indeed, for some years a kind of nervousness Foreign policy. in the attitude of the government, whose determination to assert for Germany a leading international rôle tended to isolate her in Europe. This nervousness was, in 1903 and 1904, especially evident in the efforts to weaken the Franco-Russian alliance by the policy of what Bebel denounced as Germany “crawling on her stomach before Russia.” Germany not only backed up Russian policy in the East, and at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War took up towards her an attitude of more than benevolent neutrality, but the cabinets of Berlin and St Petersburg entered into an agreement under which political offenders against either government were to be treated as traitors to both. This arrangement, which made the Prussian police the active allies of the Third Section in the persecution of The Königsberg trial. political suspects, created vast indignation among all shades of Liberal opinion in Germany, an indignation which culminated with the famous Königsberg trial. This was a prosecution of nine German subjects for sedition, conspiracy and lèse-majesté against the Russian emperor, and for the circulation of books and pamphlets attacking him and his government. The defendants were poor smugglers from the Esthonian border marshes, who in the course of their ordinary avocations had carried bales of revolutionary tracts into Russia without troubling as to their contents. The trial, which took place in July 1904, excited widespread attention. The prosecution was conducted with all the force of the government; the defence was undertaken by some of the most brilliant Liberal advocates of Germany and developed in effect into an elaborate indictment, supported by a great weight of first-hand evidence, of the iniquities of the Russian régime. The verdict of the court was a serious rebuff for the government; after a preliminary investigation of nine months, and a public trial of a fortnight, the major charges against the prisoners were dismissed, and six of them were condemned only to short terms of imprisonment for conspiracy.
The progress of the Russo-Japanese War, however, soon relieved Germany of all anxiety as to the safety of her eastern frontiers, and produced a corresponding change in her attitude. The Russian disasters in Manchuria at the beginning of 1905 were followed by an extraordinary demonstration of the emperor William’s ideas as to “the world-wide dominion of the Hohenzollerns,” in a sort of imperial progress in the East, made for the purpose of impressing the Mahommedan world with the power of Germany. In 1904 the German attitude towards Great Britain had been in the highest degree conciliatory; the Anglo-French agreement as to Egypt was agreed to at Berlin; a visit of King Edward VII. to Kiel was reciprocated by that of the German squadron to Plymouth; in July a treaty of arbitration was signed between the two countries, while in the Reichstag the chancellor declared that, Germany’s interests in Morocco being purely commercial, the understanding between France and England as to that country, embodied in the convention of the 8th of April 1904, did not immediately concern her. This attitude was now changed. On the 31st of March 1905 the emperor William landed at Tangier, and is reported on this occasion to have used language which in effect amounted to a promise to support the sultan of Morocco in resisting French control. His visit to the Holy Land and the solemn pilgrimage to Jerusalem were, in the same way, a striking coup de théâtre designed to strengthen the influence won by Germany in the councils of the Ottoman empire, an influence which she had been careful not to weaken by taking too active a part in the concert of the powers engaged in pressing on the question of Macedonian reform.
Meanwhile pressure was being put upon France to admit the German claim to a voice in the affairs of North Africa, a claim fortified by the mission of Count von Tattenbach, German minister at Lisbon, to Fez for the purpose of securing from the sherifian government special privileges for Germany. This aggressive policy was firmly resisted by M. Delcassé, the French minister of foreign affairs, and for a while war seemed to be inevitable. At Berlin powerful influences, notably that of Herr von Holstein—that mysterious omnipotence behind the throne—were working for this end; the crippling of Russia seemed too favourable an opportunity to be neglected for crushing the menace of French armaments. That an actual threat of war was conveyed to the French government (through the German ambassador at Rome, it is said) there can be no doubt. That war was prevented was due partly to the timidity of French ministers, partly to the fact that at the last moment Herr von Holstein shrank from the responsibility of pressing his arguments to a practical conclusion. The price of peace, however, was the resignation of M. Delcassé, who had been prepared to maintain a bold front. Germany had perhaps missed an opportunity for putting an end for ever to the rivalry of France; but she had inflicted a humiliation on her rival, and proved her capacity to make her voice heard in the councils of Europe.[8] The proceedings of the conference of Algeciras (see [Morocco]) emphasized the restored confidence of Germany in her international position. It was notably the part played by Austria in supporting the German point of view throughout at the conference that strengthened the position of Germany in Europe, by drawing closer the bonds of sympathy between the two empires. How strong this position had become was demonstrated during the crisis that arose after the revolution in Turkey and the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria in October 1908. The complete triumph of Baron von Aehrenthal’s policy, in the face of the opposition of most of the European powers, was due to German support, and Germany suddenly appeared as the arbiter of the affairs of the European continent (see [Europe]: History). German nervousness, which had seen British intrigues everywhere, and suspected in the beneficent activities of King Edward VII. a Machiavellian plan for isolating Germany and surrounding her with a net of hostile forces, gave way to a spirit of confidence which could afford to laugh at the terror of Germany which, to judge from the sensational reports of certain popular British journals, had seized upon Great Britain.
The great position gained by the German empire in these years was won in the face of great and increasing internal difficulties. These difficulties were, in the main, the outcome of the peculiar constitution of the empire, of Internal difficulties. the singular compromise which it represented between the traditional medieval polity and the organization of a modern state, and of the conflicts of ideals and of interests to which this gave rise; these being complicated by the masterful personality of the emperor William, and his tendency to confuse his position as German emperor by the will of the princes with his position as king of Prussia by the grace of God.
In general, Germany had passed since the war through a social and economic revolution similar to that undergone by Great Britain during the earlier half of the 19th century, though on a greater scale and at a much accelerated pace. A country mainly agricultural, and in parts purely feudal, was changed into one of vast industries and of great concentrations of population; and for the ferment created by this change there was no such safety-valve in the representative system as had existed in England since the Reform Bill. In spite of the election of the Reichstag by manhood suffrage, there existed, as Count Bülow pointed out in 1904, no real parliamentary system in Germany, and “owing to the economic, political, social and religious structure of the nation” there could never be one. Of the numerous groups composing the German parliament no one ever secured a majority, and in the absence of such a majority the imperial government, practically independent of parliament, knew how to secure its assent to its measures by a process of bargaining with each group in turn. This system had curious and very far-reaching results. The only group which stood outside it, in avowed hostility to the whole principle on which the constitution was based, was that of the Social Democrats, “the only great party in Germany which,” so the veteran Mommsen declared in 1901, “has any claim to political respect.” The consequence was the rapid extension and widening of the chasm that divided the German people. The mass of the working-class population in the Protestant parts of Germany belonged to the Social Democracy, an inclusive term covering variations of opinion from the doctrinaire system of Marx to a degree of Radicalism which in England would not be considered a bar to a peerage. To make head against this, openly denounced by the emperor himself as a treasonable movement, the government was from time to time forced to make concessions to the various groups which placed their sectional interests in the forefront of their programmes. To conciliate the Catholic Centre party, numerically the strongest of all, various concessions were from time to time made to the Roman Catholic Church, e.g. the repeal in 1904 of the clause of the Anti-Jesuit Law forbidding the settlement of individual members of the order in Germany. The Conservative Agrarians were conciliated by a series of tariff acts placing heavy duties on the importation of agricultural produce and exempting from duty agricultural implements.
The first of these tariffs, which in order to overcome Socialist obstruction was passed en bloc on December 13-14, 1902, led to an alarming alteration in the balance of parties in the new Reichstag of 1903, the Socialists—who Social Democracy. had previously numbered 58—winning 81 seats, a gain of 23. Of the other groups only one, and that hostile to the government—the Poles—had gained a seat. This startling victory of the Social Democracy, though to a certain extent discounted by the dissensions between the two wings of the party which were revealed at the congress at Dresden in the same year, was in the highest degree disconcerting to the government; but in the actual manipulation of the Reichstag it facilitated the work of the chancellor by enabling him to unite the other groups more readily against the common enemy. The most striking effect of the development of this antagonism was the gradual disappearance as a factor in politics of the Liberals, the chief builders of the Empire. Their part henceforth was to vote blindly with the Conservative groups, in a common fear of the Social Democracy, or to indulge in protests, futile because backed by no power inside or outside the parliament; their impotence was equally revealed when in December 1902 they voted with the Agrarians for the tariff, and in May 1909 when they withdrew in dudgeon from the new tariff committee, and allowed the reactionary elements a free hand. The political struggle of the future lay between the Conservative and Clerical elements in the state, alike powerful forces, and the organized power of the Social Democracy. In the elections of 1907, indeed, the Social Democratic party, owing to the unparalleled exertion of the government, had a set-back, its representation in parliament sinking to 43; but at the International Socialist Congress, which met at Stuttgart on the 18th of August, Herr Bebel was able to point out that, in spite of its defeat at the polls, the Socialist cause had actually gained strength in the country, their total poll having increased from 3,010,771 in 1903 to 3,250,000.
In addition to the political strife and anxiety due to this fundamental cleavage within the nation, Germany was troubled during the first decade of the 20th century by friction and jealousies arising out of the federal constitution Prussia and the Empire. of the Empire and the preponderant place in it of Prussia. In the work of pressing on the national and international expansion of Germany the interests and views of the lesser constituent states of the Empire were apt to be overlooked or overridden; and in the southern states there was considerable resentment at the unitarian tendency of the north, which seemed to aim at imposing the Prussian model on the whole nation. This resentment was especially conspicuous in Bavaria, which clings more tenaciously than the other states to its separate traditions. When, on the 1st of April 1902, a new stamp, with the superscription “Deutsches Reich,” was issued for the Empire, including Württemberg, Bavaria refused to accept it, retaining the stamp with the Bavarian lion, thus emphasizing her determination to retain her separate postal establishment. On the 23rd of October 1903 Baron Podevils, the new premier, addressing the Bavarian diet, declared that his government “would combat with all its strength” any tendency to assure the future of the Empire on any lines other than the federative basis laid down in the imperial constitution.
This protest was the direct outcome of an instance of the tendency of the emperor to interfere in the affairs of the various governments of the Empire. In 1902 the Clerical majority in the Bavarian diet had refused to vote Personal intervention of the emperor. £20,000 asked by the government for art purposes, whereupon the emperor had telegraphed expressing his indignation and offering to give the money himself, an offer that was politely declined. Another instance of the emperor’s interference, constitutionally of more importance as directly affecting the rights of the German sovereigns, was in the question of the succession to the principality of Lippe (see [Lippe]). The impulsive character of the emperor, which led him, with the best intentions and often with excellent effect, to interfere everywhere and in everything and to utter opinions often highly inconvenient to his ministers, was the subject of an interpellation in the Reichstag on the 20th of January 1903 by the Socialist Herr von Vollmar, himself a Bavarian. Count Bülow, in answer to his criticisms, declared that “the German people desired, not a shadow, but an emperor of flesh and blood.” None the less, the continued “indiscretions” of the emperor so incensed public opinion that, five years later, the chancellor himself was forced to side with it in obtaining from the emperor an undertaking to submit all his public utterances previously to his ministers for approval (see [William II.], German emperor).
Meanwhile, the attempt to complete the Germanization of the frontier provinces of the Empire by conciliation or repression continued. In this respect progress was made especially in Alsace-Lorraine. In May 1902, in return for the The non-German nationalities. money granted by the Reichsländer for the restoration of the imperial castle of Hohekönigsburg in the Vosges, the emperor promised to abolish the Diktaturparagraphen; the proposal was accepted by the Reichstag, and the exceptional laws relating to Alsace-Lorraine were repealed. Less happy were the efforts of the Prussian government at the Germanization of Prussian Poland and Schleswig. In the former, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the attempt to crush the Polish language and spirit, the Polish element continuously increased, reinforced by immigrants from across the frontier; in the latter the Danish language more than held its own, for similar reasons, but the treaty signed on the 11th of January 1907 between Prussia and Denmark, as to the status of the Danish “optants” in the duchies, removed the worst grievance from which the province was suffering (see [Schleswig-Holstein Question]).