Page:Rosa Luxemburg - The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The "Junius" Pamplhet) - 1918.pdf/39

 Rh the German fleet, at best, is but a very dispensible requisite for coastal defence. Even the secretary of state, Hollmann, declared in March, 189%, in the Budget Commission of the Reichstag: "We need no navy for coastal defence. Our coasts protect themselves." With the two naval bills an entirely new program was promulgated: on land and sea, Germany first! This marks the change from Bismarckian continental policies to "Welt~Politik," from the defensive to the offensive as the end and aim of Germany's military program. The language of these facts was so unmistakable that the Reichstag itself furnished the necessary commentary. Lieber, the leader of the Centrum at that time, spoke on the 11th of March, 1896, after a famous speech of the emperor on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the German Empire, which had developed the new program as a forerunner to the naval bills, in which he mentioned "shoreless naval plans" against which Germany must be prepared to enter into active opposition. Another Centrum leader, Schadler, cried out in the Reichstag on March 23rd, 1898, when the first naval bill was under discussion, "The nation believes that we cannot be first on land and first on sea. You answer, gentlemen, that is not what we want! Nevertheless, gentlemen, you are at the beginning of such a conception, at a very strong beginning!" When the second bill came, the same Schadler declared in the Reischstag on the fifth of February, 1900, referring to previous promises that there would be no further naval bills, "and today comes this bill, which means nothing more and nothing less than the inauguration of a world fleet, as a basis of support for world policies, by doubling our navy and binding the next two decades by our demands." As a matter of fact the government openly defended the political program of its new course of action. On December 11th, 1899, Von Buelow, at that time state secretary of the foreign office, in a defence of the second naval bill stated, "when the English speak of 'a greater Britain,' when the French talk of 'a nouvelle France,' when