Page:The guilt of William Hohenzollern.djvu/28

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Anyone who knows England and the English must be aware that the German naval programme was alone sufficient to bring round ever increasing sections of the English population to the notion that Germany must at any cost be made to put a stop to her naval preparations, even through a war, if not otherwise—a war which, thanks to Germany's former policy, also threatened to array against her Russia and France.

Herr von Bülow, who inaugurated this fatal policy, himself confesses that it threatened Germany with war. In his book on “The Policy of Germany” which appeared in 1916, he writes:

"“During the first ten years after the introduction of the Navy Bill of 1897 and the beginning of our ship-building, an English policy, pursued with relentless determination, would no doubt have been in a position forcibly to prevent the development of Germany as a Naval Power, and to make us incapable of doing harm before our claws, in naval matters, were grown.... And in the eighteenth month of the war the ‘Frankfurter Zeitung’ confirms the view that when it had come to a settlement by force of arms England had sorrowfully to perceive that, in spite of all her schemes of encirclement, she had missed the right moment when she could have reduced her dreaded competitor to insignificance.”—Page 40."

So the naval policy was undertaken at the peril of inciting England to war with Germany. If it did not at once come to that, it was no fault of German policy; it was the restraint of England, which, instead of violently striking down the threatening foe in war, preferred