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In 1911 also was published General Bernhardi's famous book, which defined and described the course of future action, and the aim which Germany was henceforth to pursue with all her strength: Weltmacht oder Niedergang, world-power or downfall. The events in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913 completed the conversion of those who still clung to the policy of peaceful bullying.
He himself drew from them the lesson that in ultimate analysis world-power for Germany depended on the sea-power which she had not got, and he set himself to build it up. He endeavored to educate on this subject, not only the Reichstag, where he says he had much opposition, but the public. Under Prince Bülow this was less difficult than he subsequently found it.
So ended the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar a battle which riveted the attention of the world, and brought home to Europe a realization of the fact that here was a new world-power to be reckoned with.
"Almost all the young people from one end of the Empire to the other have had brought before them in the course of their studies the dilemma which Bernhardi summed up to his readers in the three words 'world-power or decadence. Yet with all this, the resolute partisans of war formed as I thought a very small minority in the nation.
Since Drake's day more than a century had rolled on. Russia was awakening from ages of sleep, as Japan has awakened in our time, and Peter the Great was endeavouring to pilot the ship of state out to the wide seas of a world destiny. Peter, like the German Kaiser of to-day, was ambitious to make his country a world-power.
"Both Indies" have grown to-day to include the resources of nearly the whole extra-European world which the command of the sea placed at the disposal of the Entente and denied to the Central Empires; and the last great war, like those against Napoleon, Louis XIV, and Philip II, was decided by the same indispensable factor in world-power.
They wear a look, to me, very little removed from Town Councillors: carried out to the highest power, no doubt, but incorrigibly municipal none the less; and the journey through these halls of their deliberations is tedious and unenchanting. That I am wrong I am only too well aware. Does not Venetian history, with its triumphs and pageantry of world-power, prove it?
It is seldom that the national characteristic reveals itself so playfully; it is more likely to lead to tragedy. This cardinal fact may militate greatly against Russia's position as a world-power in the future, as it has in the past. Her capacity for passive resistance is enormous Napoleon learned that, and so did Frederick.
And, again for the first time in history, the immemorial East produced a navy which annihilated the fleet of a European world-power when Japan beat Russia at Tsu-shima in the centennial year of Nelson at Trafalgar.
This attitude of ours is not to be blamed, but it must always make difficult the maintenance of friendly relations with ambitious Powers. In the past our difficulties have been mainly with Russia and France. In recent years they have been with Germany. For Germany, since 1898, for the first time in her history, has been in a position, and has made the choice, to become a World-Power.
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