apr 10, 1898 - 1st Naval law

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The Kaiser had been long jealous of the British navy and had a desire for Germany to have its own empire and 'a place in the sun' and introduced an imperialistic foreign policy - Weltpolitik.
The British had a two power standard policy (made official in 1889) that their navy was to be of equal strength to those of the next two most powerful combined (noted as those of France and Russia) but the first naval law was insufficient to challenge this.
Spearheaded by Von Tirpitz, the first naval law outlined a structured plan of how the navy was going to grow and allowed the Reichstag to only have to vote on the budget for the ships once.

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