Their three successors were built with still greater speed, being finished within two years. The naval estimates, which in 1898 amounted to £6,250,000, in 1913 reached the sum of £23,350,000. The honours and decorations showered upon the fortunate Admiral after each of his parliamentary triumphs bore striking witness to the gratitude of his Sovereign. Prince von Bülow indicates in his book the difficulty of carrying out such a programme and at the same time avoiding a rupture with England. The most critical moment came in 1908. It had been shown in the House of Commons, with figures to support the statement, that Germany, by virtue of her last navy bill, would by the end of 1916 have thirty-six vessels of the Dreadnought type. This, it was remarked, would compel England to build forty-four Dreadnoughts within that period. In 1911, Germany would have thirteen and England only twelve. The German menace to England’s naval supremacy excited serious alarm in the Island Kingdom. The Emperor thought he was making a very skilful move in writing a letter to Lord Tweedmouth, First Lord of the Admiralty, a personal letter, half private, half open in character, in which he insisted on the purely defensive nature of the German programme, and tried to remove British apprehensions in regard to the development of the Imperial navy. But the shot missed its mark. By taking part in the discussion, by endeavouring to banish from the minds of English sailors the spectre of the German danger, William II., as soon as his unconventional step came to light through its disclosure in the _Times_, only added fuel to the fire of public feeling, and drove the British Parliament to get ships built all the faster, in reply to the German challenge. The members of the Asquith Cabinet, seeing the approach of the Dreadnought era, which would involve an enormous maritime outlay at the very moment when they wished to devote all their available surplus to social reform, made an ineffectual attempt to check this frenzied competition. Their public speeches and their private efforts did not induce Admiral von Tirpitz to deviate for a single instant from the steady course he had marked out for the execution of his programme. If for a brief interval in 1913 he seemed to look with favour on the “two to three standard” (_i.e._, two German to three British Dreadnoughts) proposed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr. Winston Churchill, he turned a deaf ear to the suggestion that the two countries should suspend the construction of ships (“a naval holiday”) for the space of a year. The haughty spirit of the German Admiral would make no concessions, and those who pleaded for a limitation of armaments, that vanished dream of the British taxpayer, found that they were dashing themselves against a wall of granite.