Empire understood the issue to be a real one - with France and
Russia as allies or without them.

What was back of this situation? Germany was already dominant in
Continental Europe. It had compelled Russia to submit when
Austria in 1908 annexed the Slav states of Bosnia and Herzegovina
and defied Servia to interfere or its proud patron at St.
Petersburg to prevent the humiliation; it had brought France to
her knees over the Morocco incident and the Delcasse resignation,
and would have done so again in 1911 if Great Britain had not
ranged herself behind the French republic; it held the issues of
peace and war between the great Powers during the Balkan
struggles of 1912 and 1913 and prevented Servia from winning its
legitimate fruits of victory or Montenegro from holding what it
had won; it had watched with delight the defeat of unorganized
Russia at the hands of Japan and saw what its writers described
as a decadent British Empire holding in feeble hands a quarter of
the earth in fee, with revolt coming in Ireland, rebellion
seething in India, dissatisfaction in South Africa, separation
upon the horizon in Canada and Australia. Here lay the secret of
German naval policy, of German hopes that Britain would remain
out of the inevitable struggle with France and Russia, of German
ambitions for a world-empire.

GERMAN AMBITIONS

The German nation had not up to the passing of Bismarck been the
enemy of the British people and until its belated entrance upon
the field of world politics and expansion the people had not even
been rivals. In the long series of European wars between 1688 and