d. The Great Elector, the ancestor of the Emperor who ruled
Brandenburg from 1640 to 1688, was fully conscious of the profit his
people might acquire by sea commerce, and the little navy of high-sea
frigates which he built stood manfully, and often successfully, up to
the more powerful navies of Sweden and Spain. This fleet was known,
too, far away from Brandenburg, for the records tell how the Pope and
the Maltese Knights and Louis XIV willingly admitted it to their
harbours.

But there was lacking what until lately has always hemmed German
progress--money; and the commercially-minded Dutch, a people
themselves with many German characteristics, kept the Germans from the
sea. Then came Frederick the Great, who ruled from 1740 to 1786, and
those Germans who are fond of claiming Shakespeare for their own will
also tell you that the plan drawn up by Frederick for Pitt's seven
years' struggle with France--that plan so unfortunately imitated
afterwards by the Emperor in his correspondence with Queen Victoria
during the Boer War--was the foundation-stone of British naval
supremacy! Frederick, too, saw the advantage of possessing a fleet,
but he had his hands full with France and Russia, and reluctantly had
to decline the offer of the French naval hero, Labourdonnais, to build
him a battle-fleet. At this period, and in the Great Elector's time,
Emden was the Plymouth of Prussia. When Frederick died, there followed
that time of which Germans themselves are ashamed--the hole-and-corner
time, the time when the parochial spirit was abroad and no German
burgher saw beyond the village church and the village pump; the
Biedermeier time (that comic figure of the German _Punch_), the time
of genuine German philistinism, when the people were lapped in an
idyllic repose and were content, as many are to-day, with the smallest
and simplest pleasures.

This spirit continued until the early quarter of the nineteenth
century, when Professor Frederick List roused the attention of his
countrymen, and notably that of Bismarck, to the necessity of an
independent national existence and a national economic policy. In 1836
a committee recommended naval coast protection, but it was not until
1848, when Denmark blockaded the German coast, that anything was done
to provide for it. In that year the National Assembly of delegates
from various German Diets, which met at Frankfort, voted for the
marine a million sterling to be levied on the German States,