278	ENGLISHSAGA
But the most serious difference, apart from the invisible
rivalry of commerce, was the blue ribbon of sea power. With
an expansionist Russia preaching nationality to every Slav
minority on one side of her and a France with no more ground
to yield on the other, Germany had to look like England to the
younger continents for her lebensraum. Her industrialists looked
overseas also for their markets and raw materials and, accustomed
to military victories at home, confidently demanded the pro-
tection of the imperial government. A deep sea fleet came to
be regarded as a national necessity. Even as early as 1864 Bis-
marck's campaign against Denmark revealed the new trend of
German policy.^1 So did the purchase of Heligoland—unwisely
sold by Lord Salisbury's government in 1890. After the suc-
cession of the young Emperor William II—Queen Victoria's
grandson and in his own eyes heir-elect to Neptune's trident—
the resolve to create a High Seas Fleet became a mania. The
first German Navy Act of 1898 set a pace which within ten
years had developed into a galloping race between Germany and
a fast-awakening England for the command of the sea.
At first the English had treated Teuton naval ambitions as
an immense joke.^2 To Englishmen there was something in-
congruous in the idea of fat Hans even trying to be a sailor.
They had forgotten that in the Middle Ages the seamen of the
Hanseatic League had sometimes given sea law to England and
that in the seventeenth century the fleets, which under Tromp
and de Ruyter had afforded her toughest naval encounters, had
been largely recruited from the north German ports. But after
the Boer War they began to wake up to the fact that a European
Power was challenging Trafalgar. In the closing years of King
Edward's brief reign and the first of King George's, the attention
of England was torn from internecine disputes about wages,
national health insurance, votes for women and Home Rule for
Ireland, by the disquieting spectacle of German dreadnought
after dreadnought gliding down the slips of Kiel and Wilhelms-
. haven into the waters of the Baltic and North Sea. It was all
very well for the Kaiser to assure an English statesman that it
- ^1Palmerston,. answering a question in the House in July, 1863, stated: "There is
no use in disguising the fact that what is at the bottom of the whole German design
... is the dream of a German fleet and the wish to get Kiel as a German sea-port."
^At the time of the Danish War Punch depicted two bearded British seamen
pointing at a fat, long-haired, shaggy-moustached, bespectacled Teuton and saying
to one another: "Blow it, Bill, we can't be expected to fight a lot of lubberly swabs
like him. We'll tick 'em, if that'll do I"—Pmch, advii, 5.