GERMAN QUESTION, THE, the name given in the present decade to the Commonwealth's diplomatic and naval relations with the German Empire, proclaimed in 1871 and grown, within forty years, into the one continental power whose fleet the Commonwealth's own Admiralty now takes as the measure of its own. A generation ago the phrase would have meant nothing; a generation hence it may mean something else again; an encyclopaedist may be permitted the observation, without being permitted the prophecy.
The Commonwealth has met every rising continental power of the last two centuries by the same expedient, tested first against Louis the Fourteenth and renewed against every ambitious court since: the Alliance of the Republics, the standing understanding with the United Provinces struck at the Hague in 1678, under which no single continental fleet has been suffered to outbuild the combined strength of the two maritime republics without being met by an answering programme from both. The naval estimates voted this decade under what the Admiralty calls the Two-Power Standard are that expedient's present application: the Commonwealth's yards building against the German programme as they built, in their day, against the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish, in every case with the same declared object of remaining unmatched by any two navies that might be combined against it.
Whether this present rivalry will resolve as its predecessors have — in exhaustion, in treaty, and in due course in alliance, for the Commonwealth has fought most of its present friends and befriended most of its past enemies — or whether the German Question will prove the exception to two centuries of precedent, this contributor does not pretend to know, and distrusts any colleague who claims to. What can be recorded is the temper of the thing as it stands in 1911: anxious in its detail, the naval estimates debated in the Senate with a particularity that would have astonished the framers of 1660; but not, on the whole, alarmed. The Commonwealth has out-built rising navies before and expects, not without some justice in the precedent, to do so again. If that expectation is misplaced, it will not be for want of shipyards. (H. LeF.)