During the whole of those ten years this duality and discordance were the keynote of British politics; and those whose duty it was to watch over the safety of the country lived simultaneously in two different worlds of thought. There was the actual visible world with its peaceful activities and cosmopolitan aims; and there was a hypothetical world, a world “beneath the threshold,” as it were, a world at one moment utterly fantastic, at the next seeming about to leap into reality—a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations through vistas of fathomless catastrophe. CHAPTER II MILESTONES TO ARMAGEDDON 1905–1910 ‘Enmities which are unspoken and hidden are more to be feared than those which are outspoken and open.’ CICERO. A Narrower Stage—The Victorian Calm—The Chain of Strife—Lord Salisbury Retires—Mr. Balfour and the End of an Epoch—Fall of the Conservative Government—The General Election of 1906—The Algeciras Conference—Anglo-French Military Conversations—Mr. Asquith’s Administration—The Austrian Annexations—The German Threat to Russia—The Admiralty Programme of 1909—The Growth of the German Navy—German Finance and its Implications—The Inheritance of the New German Chancellor. If the reader is to understand this tale and the point of view from which it is told, he should follow the authors mind in each principal sphere of causation. He must not only be acquainted with the military and naval situations as they existed at the outbreak of war, but with the events which led up to them. He must be introduced to the Admirals and to the Generals; he must study the organisation of the Fleets and Armies and the outlines of their strategy by sea and land; he must not shrink even from the design of ships and cannon; he must extend his view to the groupings and slow-growing antagonisms of modern States; he must contract it to the humbler but unavoidable warfare of parties and the interplay of political forces and personalities. The _dramatis personæ_ of the previous Chapter have been great States and Empires and its theme their world-wide balance and combinations. Now the stage must for a while be narrowed to the limits of these islands and occupied by the political personages and factions of the time and of the hour.