The German patriot has never realized that no efforts on the part of Germany could materially alter the balance of sea-power to her advantage as against Great Britain, and that she would be compelled to fight for her pretensions long before she was in a position to give battle on anything like equal terms. He has believed that the British nation is unnerved and effete, that it has lost both its martial and industrial vigour, that its energies have been sapped by too much wealth and prosperity, and that it is rapidly following the downward path. Finally, he is convinced that the British Parliament, under the influence of an aggressive democracy, exclusively concerned with its own immediate material needs, is losing the capacity to realize and grapple with the larger problems of international politics, and that the Cabinets proceeding from it will, in timorous anxiety, procrastinate and vacillate till it is too late to strike. In this idea he has been only confirmed by the pacifist movement in Great Britain, by the British agitation for disarmament by international agreement, and by the well-meant but unfortunate attempt of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman to effect by example what much amiable precept had done nothing to accomplish. These phenomena he has looked upon not as evidence of good-will and peaceableness, but as symptoms of physical, moral, and financial exhaustion. Such was the view of many in Germany to whom we cannot fairly deny the name of "patriot" if we are to claim it for an analogous disposition among ourselves. It was the view almost universally held by the officers of the German Army and Navy, and, with certain qualifications and reservations, it may be said to have been the view of the Emperor William. This will be evident if, with the help of his many spoken and written utterances, we attempt to follow the main lines which, with many sudden and violent deviations, his thought has taken on this subject. He has, for example, in his speeches repeatedly dwelt on the power and renown of the Hanse League--"one of the mightiest undertakings that the world has ever seen," which "was able to raise fleets such as the broad back of the sea had probably never borne up to that time," which "won such high prestige for the German name abroad," which "created markets for the German industrial regions," and which "only failed because it lacked the support of a strong united Empire obedient to a single will." At Hamburg, in June, 1911, he used these words: "I have only acted historically, for I said to myself on my accession, that the tasks which the Hansa attempted to solve by itself, and which it could not solve because the strong Empire was not at its back, and the defensive and executive power of the Empire did not exist, must unquestionably at once fall on the shoulders of the newly-arisen German Empire; and it was simply the obligations of old traditions that had to be resumed." It was in one former Hanse