admiralty, Mr McKenna, in the debate on the naval estimates in the British parliament of 1909. From these it was clear that the German government had for some time past been pressing on its naval armaments with little regard to the ostensible programme, and that in the matter of the newest types of battleships, Great Britain had to reckon with the fact that, before the date fixed for the completion of the programme, Germany might establish at least an equality. Foreign policy. The Königsberg trial. The same determined spirit which characterized German naval policy was evident also in her relations with the other powers. The suspicions as to the stability of the Triple Alliance produced, indeed, for some years a kind of nervousness in the attitude of the government, whose determination to assert for Germany a leading international rôle tended to isolate her in Europe. This nervousness was, in 1903 and 1904, especially evident in the efforts to weaken the Franco-Russian alliance by the policy of what Bebel denounced as Germany "crawling on her stomach before Russia." Germany not only backed up Russian policy in the East, and at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War took up towards her an attitude of more than benevolent neutrality, but the cabinets of Berlin and St Petersburg entered into an agreement under which political offenders against either government were to be treated as traitors to both. This arrangement, which made the Prussian police the active allies of the Third Section in the persecution of political suspects, created vast indignation among all shades of Liberal opinion in Germany, an indignation which culminated with the famous Königsberg trial. This was a prosecution of nine German subjects for sedition, conspiracy and _lèse-majesté_ against the Russian emperor, and for the circulation of books and pamphlets attacking him and his government. The defendants were poor smugglers from the Esthonian border marshes, who in the course of their ordinary avocations had carried bales of revolutionary tracts into Russia without troubling as to their contents. The trial, which took place in July 1904, excited widespread attention. The prosecution was conducted with all the force of the government; the defence was undertaken by some of the most brilliant Liberal advocates of Germany and developed in effect into an elaborate indictment, supported by a great weight of first-hand evidence, of the iniquities of the Russian régime. The verdict of the court was a serious rebuff for the government; after a preliminary investigation of nine months, and a public trial of a fortnight, the major charges against the prisoners were dismissed, and six of them were condemned only to short terms of imprisonment for conspiracy.