Page:The empire and the century.djvu/233

 adopted of building a ship as rapidly as possible. Apart from the low national debt, the best German assets in this rivalry are the cheapness of the personnel, as compared with our own and the American, and the good administration, which has never wasted money in copying the crazes to which France has so often been subjected. As compared with the United States, France, and Russia, the German building resources are cheaper in their work and more efficient, but they cannot be compared with those of Great Britain, which exceed all Europe combined. In 1901 the United Kingdom built 983,133 tons of shipping as compared with the record output for Germany of 132,873 tons in 1903. The United States has a higher output than Germany, but it is almost exclusively for the coastal, river, and lake trades, which are a national monopoly.

However unpalatable the policy may be to Germany, in view of the shallow nature of her coasts, any attempt to rival other Powers must involve her in following their designs of larger dimensions for battleships. The experience of France shows that every attempt 'to turn' the position of the battleship, if we may use a military expression, has resulted in complete disillusionment. The French Parliament has now passed a vote which practically pledges the Government to build ship for ship against Germany, a course which, if pursued for a generation at the present rate of German shipbuilding, would entail, under the two-Power standard, a programme of four battleships a year for Great Britain. Under the spell of the submarine, France neglected to build battleships, with the result that the new Minister of Marine, M. de Lanessan, found that in 1908 France would possess twenty-eight battleships, of which only seventeen would be modern. He contrasted this with twenty-two modern battleships for Germany and fifty-two for Great Britain. 'It would be an act of folly,' he added, 'on the part of France to attempt to rival England in the number of her battleships; no nation has maritime obligations which are at all comparable