By far the most effective department of the League's activity is, however, the excursions to the German naval ports, which it arranges for the benefit of schoolmasters and their classes. The participants in these outings are, as far as possible, selected from the inland states and districts, in which it is most difficult to arouse enthusiasm for the sea and the fleet. They are taken to Kiel or Wilhelmshaven, received with effusive courtesy by the naval officers delegated to look after them, and escorted through the streets by a ship's band to the dockyards of war vessels, over which they are conducted by amiable guides, who supply them with all the information likely to stimulate their interest in what they have seen. If the distance they have travelled makes it impossible for them to return home the same day, naval barracks or storehouses which happen for the moment to be vacant are placed at their disposal as night quarters. So much official complaisance and amenity, especially in a country where neither of these qualities is particularly common in the public services, arouses in those on whom it is expended a flattering sense of their own and their national importance, and schoolmasters thus captivated naturally, in due time, convey their impressions to their pupils. Though the numbers of persons thus dealt with are inevitably somewhat limited, the League unquestionably gains more ground in this way than it can hope to win by pamphlets which are read and lectures which are listened to mainly by the already convinced. The Emperor is the real director of the Navy League, and it puts forward no demand that has not already received his approval, in principle if not in detail. The League is, in short, little more than a Government department, the function of which is to carry on an agitation for more warships. It must, however, always be remembered that the League's demands represent not what the Government desires or expects to get, but what it wants to be asked for. In order that it may keep up the pretence that it is an unofficial and independent organization, the League must naturally avoid too close a correspondence between its own programme and that of the Ministry of Marine, and it is also guided by the principle that it is necessary to ask much in order to get little. Occasionally it makes a show of hurrying and worrying the Naval Minister, and of being positively objectionable to the Government, but no one suffers less than Admiral von Tirpitz from these "attacks" upon him. APPENDIX I Germany's Naval Policy The key to the naval policy of Germany is to be found in the Memorandum which was appended to the Navy Act of 1900. It is the most illuminating of State documents and is of peculiar interest in view of the war at sea which opened on August 4th, 1914.