ABSTRACT
Admiral Prince Adalbert foreshadowed later arguments: 'for a growing people there is no prosperity without expansion, no expansion with-out an overseas policy, and no overseas policy without a Navy'. This stance was to become a perfect circulus vitiosus: colonies required a fleet to protect them, while a fleet required colonies in order not to be tied down to one's shores. As late as 1905, when the colonial venture had clearly been revealed as a failure, the German Colonial Congress passed a trenchant resolution that 'a fleet is necessary as they cannot exist without a background of guns'. The High Sea Fleet has been depicted by one historian as 'a sharp knife, held gleaming and ready only a few inches away from the jugular vein of Germany's most likely enemy', Great Britain. With a fleet that stood a genuine chance of victory against Britain, the Reich would relentlessly press London for colonial concessions around the globe.
