Originally England owned the island; now it is a menace to England.
When Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister of England, he conceived what
he believed to be a shrewd diplomatic move. He offered Bismarck the
island of Helgoland in exchange for some East African concessions.
Helgoland is now the key and guard of Germany's main artery of
commerce, being the key to Hamburg. With the dirigible station of
Helgoland to guard her, Hamburg is impregnable and on England's
northern coast they have a way of looking out across the North Sea
with troubled eyes, for who knows when those terrible cartridge-shaped
monsters will rise into the air and sweep over the sea? Stranger
things have happened, even though the countries have their secret
diplomatic understandings.
Let us consider one of these new war monsters, the latest and most
powerful, the X 15. The lateat Zeppelins, charged with the newly
discovered dioxygenous gas, giving these sky battleships triple
lifting capacity; the perfecting of the Diesel motor, giving enormous
consumption (fifty of these Diesel engines, their workings secret to
the German Government, are stored under guard at the big navy yards at
Wilhelmshafen and Kiel, ready to be installed at the break of war into
submarines and dirigibles), have given the German type of aircraft an
importance undreamed of and unsuspected by the rest of the world.
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