forded by
summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an
ocean greyhound. The humblest trimmer would treat him with the
indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and
in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a
demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.

It has ever been the world's dictum that empire and commerce go hand in
hand. In the past the one was impossible without the other. Rome
gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was
only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost
both power and trade. With a just system of economics it is highly
probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of
the Germanic peoples. When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the
conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire. In the
present, empire and commerce have become interdependent. Such wonders
has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so
great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations
have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets. The
favoured portions of the earth are occupied. From their seats in the
temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the
exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to
war hot-footed. Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the
fragments. There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are
yet hungry. There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in
wide-stretching lands, awaiting them. On either hand they confront the
naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser
struggle among themselves. And all the while the planet shrinks beneath
their grasp.

Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power
must be a sea power. Upon the control of the sea depends the control of
trade. Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for
thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground
was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid
edifices. The cities of Italy were the world's merchants till new trade
routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west
and fell into other hands. Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of
maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but ga