e with the monsters in the
deeps. The sea is beyond him, surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing
him with abundant benedictions.

So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that man cannot sterilize
it. He despoils none of its surface when he sails his ships. He does not
annihilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer in its deluging,
consuming soil. It controls him mightily.

The seas and the shores have provided the trading ways of the peoples.
The ocean connects all lands, surrounds all lands. Until recent times
the great marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy water access
of them. The polity of early settlements was largely the polity of the
sea and the strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the first of
the heroic human qualities. Probably all dry land was once under the
sea, and therefrom has it drawn much of its power.

From earliest times the sea has yielded property common to all and free
to whomever would take it,--the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage
of ships. Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. When
government appropriates the wreckage of ships and the stranded derelict
of the sea, the people may think it justifiable protection of their
rights to secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws and customs
and old restraints lose their force and vanish on the sea; and freedom
rises out of the sea.

And so the ocean has contributed to the making of the outlook of the
human family. The race would be a very different race had there been no
sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears and stimulating
hopes, bringing its freight, bearing tidings of far lands, sundering
traditions, rolling the waves of its elemental music, driving its rank
smells into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul.

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