Germany had no maritime traditions and a scanty seafaring population to assist her. Her seaboard upon the North Sea is a maze of shallows and sandbanks, through which devious channels leading to her naval and commercial bases are kept open only by continuous dredging. God has made Plymouth Sound, Spithead and the Firth of Forth; the Devil, it is alleged, has been responsible for Scapa and the Pentland Firth in winter; but man, German man, has made the navigable mouths of the Elbe, the Weser and the Ems. The Baltic is an inland sea upon which the coasting trade had for centuries been mainly in the hands of Scandinavians. Until late in the nineteenth century Germany was one of the least maritime of all nations; almost at a leap she sprang into the position of one of the greatest. It is said that peoples get the governments which they deserve; it is certainly true that when peoples are blind their governments shut their eyes. In the Country of the Blind the one-eyed man is not King; he is flung out for having the impertinence to pretend to see. In a state of blindness or of careless indifference we made Germany a present of Heligoland in 1890. It looked a poor thing, a crumbling bit of waste rock, and when the Kaiser asked for it he received the gift almost without discussion. Both our Government and Court at that time were almost rabidly pro-German. We all cherished so much suspicion of France and Russia that we had none left to spare for Germany. Heligoland was then of no great use to us, but it was of incalculable value to our future enemies. A German Heligoland fortified, equipped with airship sheds and long-distance wireless, a shelter for submarines, was to the new German Navy only second in value to the Kiel Canal. Islands do not “command” anything beyond range of their guns, especially when they have no harbours; but Heligoland, though it in no sense commanded the approach to the German bases, was an invaluable outpost and observation station. It is a little island of crumbling red rock, preserved only by man’s labour from vanishing into the sea; it is a mile long and less than one-third of a mile wide; it is 28 miles from the nearest mainland. Yet when we gave to Germany this scrap of wasting rock, we gave her the equivalent in naval value of a fleet. We secured her North Sea bases from our sudden attacks, and we gave her an observation station from which she could direct attacks against ourselves.