If this understanding is acceptable, the British Government will forthwith suggest the next step, as they think that the visit of a British Minister to Berlin should in the first instance be private and unofficial. All being acceptable, the Secretary of State for War accompanied by Sir Ernest Cassel, started accordingly on February 6 for Berlin. I had undertaken some weeks earlier to make a speech in support of the Home Rule Bill in Belfast. Violent hostility to this project developed in the inflammable capital of Ulster. Being publicly committed, I had no choice but to fulfil my engagement, though to avoid unnecessary provocation the meeting-place was changed from the Ulster Hall to a large tent which was erected in the outskirts of the city. Threats of violence and riot were loudly proclaimed on every side and nearly 10,000 troops were concentrated in the area to keep the peace. I had planned, if all went well at Belfast, to go on the next day to Glasgow to inspect some of the shipbuilding works along the Clyde, and to make a speech on the Naval position, which should state very plainly our root intentions and be the necessary counterpart of the Haldane mission. As I was waiting for the train for Ireland to leave the London railway station, I read in the late edition of the evening papers the German Emperor’s speech on the opening of the Reichstag announcing Bills for the increase both of the Army and the Navy. The new Navy Law was still a secret to the British and German nations alike, but knowing as I did its scope and character and viewing it in conjunction with the Army Bill, I sustained a strong impression at this moment of the approaching danger. One sentence, full of German self-revelation, stood out vividly. ‘It is my constant duty and care to maintain and to strengthen on land and water, the power of defence of the German people, _which has no lack of young men fit to bear arms_.’ It was indeed true. One thought of France with her declining birthrate peering out across her fortresses into the wide German lands and silently reflecting on these ‘young men fit to bear arms’ of whom there was indeed ‘no lack.’ My mind, skipping over the day of Irish turmoil and the worry of the speech that lay before me, fixed upon Glasgow as the place where some answer to this threat of continental domination might perhaps be provided. Once again Europe might find a safeguard against military overlordship in an island which had never been and never would be ‘lacking in trained and hardy mariners bred from their boyhood up to the service of the sea.’ Accordingly, after the Irish ordeal was over, I said at Glasgow:—