and Austria, with that of Italy possibly added. It was the apprehension
occasioned by Germany's warlike policy that made it an unavoidable act
of prudence to enter into the Entente. It was our only means of making
our sea power secure and able to protect us against threats of invasions
by great Continental armies. The Emperor and his Chancellor should
therefore have thought of some other way of securing the peace than that
of trying to detach us from the Entente.

The alternative was obvious. Germany should have offered to cease to
pile up armaments, if our desire for friendly relations all round could
be so extended as to bring all the Powers belonging to both groups into
them, along with England. But the German policy of relying on superior
strength in armaments as the true guarantee of peace did not admit of
this. I am no admirer of the principle of the balance of power. I should
like to say good-bye to it. I prefer the principle of a League of
Nations, if that be practicable, or, at the very least, of an Entente
comprising all the Powers. But if neither of these alternatives be
possible there remains, for the people who desire to be secure, only the
method of the balance of power. Now Germany drove us to this by her
indisposition to change her traditional policy and to be content to
rely on the settlement of specific differences for the good feeling that
always tends to result. She had, it is true, the misfortune for so
strong a nation to have been born a hundred years too late. She had got
less in Africa than she might have had. We were ready to help her to a
place in the sun there and elsewhere in the world, and to give up
something for this end, if only we could secure peace and contentment on
her part. But she would not have it so, and she chose to follow the
principle of relying on the "Mailed Fist." Of this policy, when pursued
recklessly, Bismarck well understood the danger. "Prestige politics," as
he called them, he hated. In February, 1888, he laid down in a
well-known speech what he held to be the true principle. "Every Great
Power which seeks to exert pressure on the politics of other countries,
and to direct affairs outside the sphere of interest which God has
assigned to it, carries on politics of power, and not of interest; it
works for prestige." But that principle was not consistently followed by
William the Second. Into the detailed story of his departure from it I
have not space to enter. But those