Germany towards her Western neighbours that drove England forward step
by step in a policy of precautions which, she hoped, would avert a
European conflagration, and which her rivals have attempted to represent
as stages in a Machiavellian design to ruin Germany's well-being. These
precautions, so obviously necessary that they were continued and
expanded by the most pacific Government which England has seen since Mr.
Gladstone's retirement, have taken two forms: that of diplomatic
understandings, and that of naval preparations. Whichever form they have
taken, they have been adopted in response to definite provocations, and
to threats which it was impossible to overlook. They have been strictly
and jealously measured by the magnitude of the peril immediately in
view. In her diplomacy England has given no blank cheques; in her
armaments she has cut down expenditure to the minimum that, with
reasonable good fortune, might enable her to defend this country and
English sea-borne trade against any probable combination of hostile
Powers.

Let us consider (1) the development of the diplomatic situation since
1870, (2) the so-called race of armaments since 1886.

The Treaty of Frankfort (May 10, 1871), in which France submitted to the
demands of the new-born German Empire, opened a fresh era of European
diplomacy and international competition. The German Empire became at
once, and has ever since remained, the predominant Power in Western
Europe. The public opinion of this new Germany has been captured to no
small extent by the views of such aggressive patriots as Treitschke, who
openly avowed that 'the greatness and good of the world is to be found
in the predominance there of German culture, of the German mind, in a
word of the German character'. The school of Treitschke looked for the
establishment of a German world-empire, and held that the essential