THE " RAISON D'ETRE " OF THE GERMAN NAVY.
THE able Berlin correspondent of the Times gives in last Monday's issue an account of speeches delivered at a meeting of the German Navy League at Kiel which well deserves the attention of the British public. These speeches show with unusual clearness the raison d'etre of the Imperial Navy, and the attitude of the advocates of sea power in Germany towards the question of disarmament. The occasion of the meeting was a lecture on " England and Germany " given by Professor Harms, who occupies the Chair of Political Economy at Kiel University. Among his audience was not only the president of the German Navy League, Grand Admiral von Koester, but also the third son of the Emperor William, Prince Adalbert of Prussia, who is an officer of the German Navy. Thus the meeting may fairly be said to have received that stamp of official sanction which in the case of Germany is all-important. Professor Harms appears to have begun his speech by a laudation of Protection as the source of Germany's increased wealth and expanding trade, but into this matter we do not propose to follow him. He then went on to make a suggestion which the correspondent of the Times says is looked upon as inconceivable by the bulk of thoughtful Germans, and is certainly an impossibility,—namely, that Britain " might forestall this growth of power of her industrial rival by going to war" with her. The Professor considered, however, that a position of security against this problematic war of aggression was not unattainable, " for England's position in India and.in Egypt and the exposed situation of Canada compel her to practise extreme caution in regard to the concentration of her forces on one spot." While admitting that under present conditions the burden of taxation which is imposed by the construction of a navy in addition to a. great army is not justifiable in theory, Professor Harms says that Germany is living through one of those periods in which a nation is required to make sacrifices almost up to the limit of what is possible. " If the belief prevails in many quarters that the German people finished its great tasks on the battlefields of France, that is a fatal mistake in which we cannot long indulge with impunity."
We do not, of course, wish to infer too much from the speech of a single speaker, but in view of other evidence as to the tendency of public feeling in Germany we cannot resist the belief that Professor Harms does represent a very large part of German opinion, and, what is far more important, expresses the views of people who exercise a very great influence upon the governing caste. What we have to con- sider in the case of a bureaucratic State like Germany is not the voters,—the people at large. These count for com- paratively little. The men who matter are the men who have their hands upon the levers that control the great Government machine. If the German people could have been polled on the policies of the attack upon Denmark, the war with Austria, and the deliberate and calculated actions which led to the war with France, they would almost certainly have condemned them root and branch. This fact, however, did not in the least prevent Bismarck and those associated with him from planning and carrying out the policy of expansion and aggrandisement which led to Germany occupying the position she now occupies, and to the placing of her policy upon lines which it has followed ever since. Roughly speaking, the aim of the new Bismarckian school is to do on the sea and in the world's sphere what the old Bismarckian school did on the land and in Central Europe,—namely, to give Germany the dominant place. The new Bismarckians, like the old, do not believe that their ends can be attained through sentimental or idealistic means. If their policy is to succeed, it must be through blood and iron, and through political action which many onlookers would designate as brutal and un- scrupulous, but which Bismarck himself would have defined as " real," and -dictated by common-sense and worldly wisdom. We fully admit, however, that it is difficult for those who must necessarily be injuriously affected by the success of the policy outlined by Professor Harms to judge it quite impartially. All we will say of it on the present occasion is that it is unquestionably a great and far-reaching policy, and fraught with tremendous issues for the human race, and especially for the British people. Rightly or wrongly, it cannot be carried out without a conflict of interests with this country, and with- out taking away from the British people something which they possess now, and which they have hitherto believed, and we think will continue to believe, is absolutely essential to their welfare, nay, their very existence, and that is supremacy at sea. It is to be noted that Admiral von Koester, though he declared that Professor Harms's lecture carried conviction, tried to some extent to minimise its effect. After stating, according to the correspondent of the Times, that he was the official representative of Germany, he went- on to declare that the Germans desired a strong Navy for the same reason as the Americans. They had got to have a strong Navy in order to protect their trade. Only the hot- heads of the Navy League, he added, failed to see that England could not be caught up. The president of the Navy League appears to have turned his attention next to the question of disarmament. But here it will be best to give the Admiral's words as they are reported in the Times :— " He could see nothing that was in the least degree practical in all the talk about disarmament. The Power that was absolutely strongest could disarm. But it did not do so. A conqueror could compel the conquered to disarm. Nobody knew better than the German people what that meant. There was a third conception— the so-railed international disarmament. Germany was not building against a single opponent, and therefore any inter- national agreement must be an agreement among all the nations. Did they believe that Japanese and Russians, Turks and Greeks, could ever agree upon a definition of their navies? International disarmament could mean nothing except the paralysing of free development. It was sometimes suggested that there was another way—the way of alliances. But the truth was that if anybody wanted an ally he had to be strong and bring to the alliance either an army or a navy. After developing farther this pure German view of international associations, Admiral von Koester went on to say that alliances were not ever- lasting. They appeared one day and vanished the next—to-day sunshine, to-morrow deepest darkness. How did that, he asked, accord with the development of a navy ? Navies required decades or, he would ray, half a century for their development. Even if ships could be built quickly, the organization and the system required many years. Even, therefore, in the case of an alliance it was necessary to be ready for fresh complications."
Grand Admiral von Koester ended his speech by declaring that the Germans did not think of having a Navy equal in size to the English. What they wanted was a force sufficient to protect them against all conceivable attacks. Their programme was to carry out the Navy Law in all its parts. The true significance of this remark is very perti- nently set forth by the correspondent of the Times. He points out that the president of the Navy League and his collenues have repeatedly explained that this means a great, deal more than appears in the ordinary words of the German naval programme.
If the minimising speech of the president of the Navy League is construed without sentiment, it appears to us that what the Navy League in reality means by a Navy strong enough to protect Germany from all attacks is a Navy capable of challenging our command of the sea, and if necessary of winning it from us in a naval conflict. At the same time, while the process of catching us up and endeavouring to pass us is going on, the leaders of the League realise that it would be in a high degree unwise to proclaim the fact too openly. It might, they imagine, bring about that attack upon Germany before she is ready which undoubtedly a large section of Germans dread, and dread because they realise that it would be the policy which in similar circumstances they would themselves be certain to pursue. One of the difficulties of the present situation is to make the advocates of German expansion realise that in no case shall we attack merely because we know that now we are the stronger at sea but do not feel sure whether this great superiority can be maintained. When it is explained that for good or ill the British people could never be induced to make such an attack, the ordinary German is incredulous ; he will think, though he will not say openly : " That is certainly not how we should act in similar circumstances, and are we not bound to assume that the English will be as open to the guidance of common-sense and of the instinct of self-preservation as we are? It is difficult to believe that they could be so reckless as to wait till we are ready before they strike." That is undoubtedly the thought which haunts many German minds. To put the matter in another way. If the French were able to devise some scheme for very greatly increasing the size and power of their Army by, say, the end of a period of five years from now, and the Germans were doubtful whether they could meet this expansion without not only tremendous sacrifices but tremendous risks, they would feel perfectly justified in striking at once, and thereby averting the threatened danger. That being so, as we have said above, the prudent members of the German Navy League always think it wise to talk about " hotheads," of the impossibility of really catching up England, and so forth. We do not profess to have examined the expressions of opinion before the war of 1866 with Austria, but we should be very much surprised if it were not found that official speakers and writers in Prussia constantly declared that it was absurd to imagine that their Army could ever be made strong enough to challenge the military power of the great Austrian Empire, and that all Prussia was doing in the matter of military improvements was to make herself safe from attack. Only " hotheads " had any idea of an army designed for any other purpose. In raising the question which, as we have said, haunts a certain number of German minds—i.e., that we may do the so-called common-sense thing and not wait for German naval preparations to be complete—we admit that we are touching delicate, nay, dangerous, ground. We should therefore like to take this opportunity of saying once more that we are certain that the British people could never be induced to adopt what we may call the Bismarckian plan of insisting that the struggle foi sea power shall take place while the Germans are notoriously so much weaker than we are. But even if we thought it would be possible to induce the British public, which we are sure it is not, to change their minds in this respect. and to attack the Germans before their Navy programme is complete, we should refuse absolutely to advo- cate that course. The best proof we can give of the sincerity of our words is the fact that we, and, what is far more important, all other responsible advocates of a supreme Navy in this country, are pledged to the alternative policy,—the policy of so greatly increasing our own armaments that Germany will not be able to catch us up, and that our present relative supremacy will be maintained If that is done, there can never be any valid reason for pre- cipitating a war. If, however, we advocated. a Bismarckian policy for Britain, it would not be necessary to ask for more Dreadnoughts ' to be laid down. We should have a far shorter and easier, and apparently cheaper, way of dealing with the German Navy. It is because we are one and all determined to have nothing to do with a Bismarckian policy that we insist that our shipbuilding programme must be very greatly enlarged. We want to deal with the German competition, not by the short way, the war way, the way of attacking her while she is relatively weak, but by the longer way and the peaceful way of so greatly increasing our own armaments that she will have to abandon the struggle and a conflict will be avoided.
To summarise the matter again, and it cannot be sum- marised too often, there are two ways of securing that command of the sea which all Britons are agreed must be secured to us. One is by destroying the German Fleet before it has attained dimensions sufficiently great to put our sea power in jeopardy. The other way, and the way all sane British Imperialists and defenders of our sea power advocate, is a scheme of naval construction so large as to neutralise, and more than neutralise, German competition, and to maintain our present relative position of supremacy. All friends of peace and of the maintenance of existing rela- tions with Germany should rally, then, to the cause of a supreme Navy, and should make it clear that it is in this way, and in this way only, that we intend to deal with and defeat German rivalry. The policy of disarmament by agreement, as Admiral von Koester shows, is purely chimerical. Even in the most favourable circumstances agreement as to armaments would only be possible if there were but two naval Powers existing in the world. The door for agree- ment as to armaments being closed, there is only one policy for us which is compatible with international comity and goodwill, and that is the policy of outbuilding and outananning the Germans in their attempt to wrest from us the command of the sea.
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