He at once took the measure of the Reichstag, and saw how he could make it obedient to his will. It is traditional in the higher ranks of the German official hierarchy to despise popular assemblies, and to treat them with an air of pedagogic superciliousness. Hollmann had become so impatient at the continual mutilation of his estimates that at last he thumped his fist menacingly on the table. That precipitate action sealed his fate. Admiral von Tirpitz recognized that it would be better for him if he disguised his contempt, and smothered his anger in his beard. In one of Rostand's plays, a lady is asked how she passed the sentries who were posted round a jealously guarded camp, and she replies: "I smiled at them." If the Naval Minister were to be asked how he induced the parties who had been so obdurate to his predecessor's demands to pass his own so much more expensive projects, he, too, might have replied: "I smiled at them." Completely breaking with the tradition of schoolmasterly superiority, he was all complacency and urbanity to the ignorant mediocrities who had it in their power to frustrate his designs. His beaming rubicund countenance was ever the brightest and most ingratiating feature in the debates on his bills and estimates. His good humour was inexhaustible, his courtesy unflagging, his patience undisconcertable. He knew exactly what he wanted, and thought only of that. His mind was not clouded, like those of so many of his ministerial colleagues, by religious or political prejudices. He was ready to accept ships from the hands of Catholics or Socialists. Whether they ranked the Pope above the Emperor, or preferred a republic to a monarchy, was quite indifferent to him, if only they would grant him the ships and the men he asked for. In one of his many veiled conflicts with the Foreign Office, Admiral von Tirpitz is understood to have exclaimed: "Politics are your affair--I build ships!" and it was precisely because he attended strictly and conscientiously to his own business that he was able to do it so well. It was incumbent upon him as administrator of the Navy to make it as strong and efficient as possible, and it lay with the Chancellors to decide whether the line he was following was consistent with the general policy of the Empire. That, against their own convictions and what they conceived to be Germany's foreign interests, they allowed him to have his own way, only proved their weakness and his strength.