Von Tirpitz reveals himself in these pages as an able but most unsympathetic figure. He lays the lash generously about his colleagues, and the Emperor in particular is not spared. Creator of the German Navy, he lays bare the whole ruthless spirit animating the German war lords. English readers will notice with interest, and perhaps some surprise, the view of themselves and their country on which the Admiral enlarges. According to Von Tirpitz, the growth of the German Navy was not only directed towards making any English attack on German trade risky, but served the philanthropic purpose of supporting the non-Anglo-Saxon races in their struggle for freedom against the intolerable dictatorship of British sea-power. It was, in fact, the special mission of the German Empire to free the world from the strangling tyranny of the Anglo-Saxons. The English reader learns with surprise as he makes his way through these volumes how ruthless was the spirit in which England marked Germany down for destruction. Finally, through craft and Machiavellian principles of the worst kind, she accomplished her end. While German statesmen were weak, vacillating, and hopelessly pacific, a succession of English Governments, Radical no less than Conservative, animated one and all by the same fell purpose, only waited for the appropriate moment to fall on the European Simon Pure. Lord Haldane during his visit to Berlin in 1912 figures as a skilled and determined mock negotiator, adamant as to concessions on the English side, but bent on sowing discord among German statesmen and reducing the fleet to impotence. Tirpitz accuses him of an evil conscience. Did not Lord Haldane shut his eyes to the wholly pacific intentions of Germany and invent a Berlin war party with which to inflame public opinion in England?