[Footnote 13: It has since become known that the Americans had designed an all-big-gun ship before the British Dreadnought was laid down.] [Footnote 14: British naval opinion held from the first that these ships of the Nassau type vitiated the Dreadnought principle of simplicity of armament, and were so over-gunned as to be ineffective units. Sea-service has tended to confirm this view.] [Footnote 15: In the three succeeding years, in accordance with the British Government's policy of a limitation of naval armaments, and as an example to other Powers, this advantage was partially lost, and hence the large programme of 1909-10.] [Footnote 16: _Cf._ Appendix II.] [Footnote 17: In his speech in the House of Commons on March 26th, 1913, the First Lord corrected this figure. He stated that the maximum to be attained under the new Fleet Law in 1920 was 107,000, apart from reserves.] [Footnote 18: These two groups of ships are of practically the same design.] CHAPTER VI German Ships, Officers, and Men In material, in the art of constructing and equipping ships of war, Germany at the beginning of the war ranked far above most of the Great Powers, and she was little, if anything, behind even Great Britain in workmanship, rapidity and cheapness. Her personnel also stood high, for she had succeeded in translating into naval terms the professional and disciplinary codes which have raised the German Army to a position of pre-eminence. Above all she had succeeded, in a degree never before attempted by any country, in keeping ships and men in constant association. The German naval authorities recognized that, while a conscriptive system of manning a fleet brings into the organization certain grave and ineradicable disadvantages, it did at least enable large numbers of officers and men to be borne for service at a relatively small annual cost. Realising this economic benefit of conscription, the Marineamt had no hesitation in increasing its personnel rapidly from year to year. The expansion of this element of naval power kept pace with the activity of the shipyards. This policy of simultaneous increase of ships and of men, accompanied as it was by the expansion of her shipbuilding and allied industries and of her dockyards, has been the secret of the rapid rise of Germany as a maritime Power wielding world-wide influence. Within the memory of the present generation German ships of war, if not built in England, were constructed in Germany with materials obtained entirely or in part from England. Her earliest armoured ships of any account--the _Deutschland_, the _Kaiser_ and the _Konig Wilhelm_--were all constructed on the banks of the Thames at the old Samuda Yard. The great industry which Germany and other foreign nations helped to support is now dead, and on the other side of the North Sea is to be seen an activity more intense and on a far larger scale than the Thames establishments could boast even in the day of their greatest prosperity.