But the seeds of conflict lay deeper--in the relentless diplomacy of Bismarck, bound sooner or later to manoeuvre Napoleon III into a position from which he could not escape without resort to the arbitrament of war. In 1869 the celebration of the centenary of Napoleon I and the proposed inauguration of a Constitutional _régime_ furnished _Punch_ with material for some plain-spoken advice to Napoleon's successor and namesake. Distrust of Louis Napoleon still dominated _Punch's_ outlook on foreign politics and clouded his vision. Strange to say the growth of the Prussian fleet is not only praised, but welcomed:-- BRAVO, BISMARCK! John Bull used to laugh to scorn the idea of a Prussian Navy, and chuckled hugely when _Punch_ christened it for him "The Fleet of the Future." But lo, "the wheel of Time has brought about his revenges," and the Fleet of the Future is the Fleet of the Present! Prussia _has_ a fleet--and no chaff! A respectable force of steam ironclads, backed by a serviceable knot of unarmoured sailing-frigates and corvettes, with a first-class naval arsenal and dockyard, on the Jahde, is a very different thing from the solitary "gunboat on the Spree," which we used to poke our fun at twenty years ago. Britannia, through her _Punch_, rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade--Prussian blue; and will be glad, in all fair quarrels, to hail it alongside the true blue of the British man-o'-war's-man. But the mood of welcome was tempered with misgiving, and the possibility of an eventual naval war with Germany filled _Punch_ with gloomy forebodings, which, in view of subsequent developments, approach to something like prophetic strain:-- LINE OF BATTLE IN SMOKE We trust we shall ever preserve our friendship with the countrymen of Hans Breitmann. We allowed Denmark to be robbed of Schleswig-Holstein, and tolerated the total theft of Hanover; so that there seems to be no conceivable offence that can hook us into a war with Prussia and Germany. That view is a pleasant one to contemplate for thinking people, who, but for it, would be rendered very uneasy by the following statement in a _Times'_ leader on "The Cruise of the Lords of the Admiralty":-- "It has been imagined that the introduction of steam-power would render naval tactics of extreme importance in any future engagements, but when on one occasion the ships were ordered to go into action, it was found that a few minutes sufficed to envelope the whole fleet in so dense a cloud of smoke that signals were no longer visible, and all that any vessel could do was to fire as rapidly as possible into the darkness around her."