After the great victories of Prussia a generation ago (the spoliation of Denmark in 1864, the supremacy established over Austria in 1866, the crushing defeat of France and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, with two millions of people in 1870-1), Europe gradually drifted into being an armed camp, the great forces of which were more or less in equilibrium. Prussia had, for the moment at least, achieved all that she desired. The French were for quite twenty years ardently desirous of recovering what they had lost; but Europe would not allow the war to be renewed, and Prussia, now at the head of a newly constituted German Empire, made an arrangement with Austria and with Italy to curb the French desire for recovery. The French, obviously inferior before this triple alliance, gradually persuaded the Russians to support them; but the Russians would not support the French in provoking another great war, and with the French themselves the old feeling gradually deadened. It did not disappear--any incident might have revived it--but the anxious desire for immediate war when the opportunity should come got less and less, and at the end of the process, say towards 1904, when a new generation had grown up in all the countries concerned, there was a sort of deadlock, every one very heavily armed, the principal antagonists, France and Germany, armed to their utmost, but the European States, as a whole, unwilling to allow any one of them to break the peace. It was about this moment that Prussia committed what the future historian will regard, very probably, as the capital blunder in her long career of success. She began to build a great fleet. Here the reader should note two very important consequences of the great Prussian victories which had taken place a generation before. The first was the immense expansion of German industrialism. Germany, from an agricultural State, became a State largely occupied in mining, smelting, spinning, and shipbuilding; and there went with this revolution, as there always goes with modern industrialism, a large and unhealthy increase of population. The German Empire, after its war with France, was roughly equal to the population of the French; but the German Empire, after this successful industrial experiment, the result of its victories, was much more than half as large again in population as the French (68 to 39). Secondly, the German Empire developed a new and very large maritime commerce. This second thing did not follow, as some have imagined it does, from the first. Germany might have exported largely without exporting in her own ships. The creation of Germany's new mercantile marine was a deliberate part of the general Prussian policy of expansion. It was heavily subsidized, especially directed into the form of great international passenger lines, and carefully co-ordinated with the rest of the Prussian scheme throughout the world.