At last, the English first lord of the navy, Mr. Winston Churchill, proposed to Germany that each country take a “naval holiday.” In other words, he practically said to Germany, “If you people will stop building warships for a year, we will also. Then at the end of the year, we shall be no worse off or better off than we were at the beginning.” [Illustration: Submarine] Germany laughed at this proposal. To her, it showed that England could not stand the strain very much longer. “Besides,” said the Germans, “it is all very well for England to be satisfied with her present navy, which is half again as large as ours. If our navy were the strongest in the world, we too would be glad to have all nations stop building warships,” and they laid down the keels of four new super-dreadnaughts. But other things disturbed the peace of mind of the German militarists. For a long time, the population of France had not been increasing, while Germany almost doubled her numbers from 1860 to 1900. Now, to their dismay, the German birth-rate began to grow less and they saw the population of Russia growing larger by 20% every ten years. Again, they learned that Russia was about to build a series of railroads near the German frontier which would enable them to rush an army to attack Germany at very short notice. The Germans already had such railroads in their own country, but they did not propose to let their neighbors have this advantage also. Again, France had recently passed a law forcing every young man to put three years in military service instead of two. This would increase France’s standing army by 50 per cent. The German people, who up to this time had been very docile and very obedient to the military rule, were showing signs of discontent. The Socialists, a party who represented the working people largely, and who were strongly opposed to war, had been growing very fast. In the last election, they had gained many representatives in the German congress, and had cast over 4,000,000 votes. The only thing that kept them from having a majority in the Reichstag (the German congress) was the fact that in some districts, the voters of the other parties combined against them. In this way, the military class still held control of the German government, but it was afraid that it would not be for long. With nearly half the able-bodied men in the country spending their time drilling and doing guard duty, the other half of the population had to earn money enough to support their own families and also the families of the men in the army. As one writer has put it, “Every workingman in Europe carried a soldier on his back who reached down and took the bread out of his platter.”