greedily grasped at even by our Liberals.[1] Such facts give us a measure of the naivete displayed by the French Senator, d'Estournelles de Constant, a member of the Hague Tribunal, in an essay on the limitation of armaments.[2] Indeed, in the imagination of this political dreamer it needs not even the proverbial swallow to make the summer of disarmament, a simple sparrow will do. After that it is almost refreshing to encounter the honest brutality with which the great powers at the conference dropped Mr. Stead's proposals and refused even to place the question of disarmament on the agenda of the second conference.
- ↑ See Berliner Tageblatt of October 27, 1906. Note above all the notorious resolution handed in by Ablass, December 13, 1906, and the Liberal platform for the Reichstag elections of January 25, 1907.
- ↑ La Revue, October i, 1906. The "actual results achieved" by the movement for disarmament, are a well preserved secret of the editorial board of the Revue.
of some 83 million marks as compared with the budget of 1906–7. Fine prospects of further extravagant naval armaments were held out by an evidently inspired article that appeared in the Reichsbote, on December 21, 1906. To all that must be added the enormous expenses for colonial wars (454 millions for the China Expedition, 490 millions already for the rebellion in Southwest Africa, 2 millions for the rebellion in East Africa, etc.); the question of footing those bills led, in December, 1906, to a conflict and the dissolution of the Reichstag.
