The patriotic German, who is familiar with his country's history, knows that, five or six hundred years ago, his forefathers monopolized the markets and policed the seas of Northern and Western Europe. He realizes keenly that Germany's maritime and industrial progress was first checked, and then retarded for centuries, by political division and internecine and foreign wars. Possibly he still remembers that great crescendo of victory in which Prussia smothered Denmark, then overthrew Austria in a single battle, and finally, at the head of the kindred Teutonic States, humbled France in the dust, and welded Germany together in one indivisible whole. Even if he does not remember it as part of his own personal experience, all its vivid and stimulating episodes have been a thousand times impressed upon his mind by schoolmaster, politician, historian, and journalist. That after this tremendous martial achievement he should regard his country as the mistress of the continent of Europe is no matter for surprise. But he sees, too, that the Germany of Luther and Goethe, of Ranke, Liebig, Helmholz, and Mommsen, of Bismarck and Moltke, has become also the Germany of Krupp, Siemens, Rathenau, Ballin, and Gwinner; that the products of German industry, the fruits of an unexampled application of the discoveries of science to the processes of manufacture, have been carried by German ships to the remotest ends of the earth; that the material prosperity of his country has been advancing in every direction by leaps and bounds. And he thus believes Germany to be strong, wise, and wealthy, and in every way fitted to stand at the head of mankind. But in one respect he has felt, to his bitter mortification, that she is powerless. Wherever he goes on the world's oceans, he is confronted by those iron walls of Great Britain, which mean that he is there only by the sufferance of one who is immeasurably stronger than himself.