Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/26

22 the one great mass of opposition to Germany, who seemed to threaten all of them.

The beginning of this fateful change in German world-policy is to be found in the Navy Bill of 1897, which led to the competition in armaments with England, and which was only comprehensible on the supposition that its ultimate goal was the overthrow of England's supremacy at sea. And, in fact, this has been often enough avowed by pan-German organs and politicians as the task of German naval preparations.

In this way public opinion in England was intensely excited against Germany.

England won the dominion of the seas in the time of the Napoleonic wars, and no Power has since undertaken to challenge it. Shortly after the Peace of Vienna this dominion had markedly changed its character. During the first decades of the nineteenth century England was still in large measure an agrarian country, which could support its own population, if need were. Far different was the case a little later. As the most industrialized of all countries, England saw herself compelled to rely, more than any other territory, not merely for raw materials but for food, on abundant imports from oversea.

Even in 1850, England, Wales and Scotland alone, not including Ireland, had a rural population as numerous as that of the towns. In the year 1911 the town population of England and Wales amounted to 78 per cent., in Scotland to 75 per cent., of the total inhabitants of the country.

In the eighteenth century England was a corn-exporting country. Even during the early part of the nineteenth century its home production in corn nearly covered the home demand. In the decade 1811–1820