wever regarded as essential to their own interests might affect,
even by a shadow on the sea, the world orbit of British interests.
These interests it will be noted have reached such a stage of
development as to require that all foreign States that cannot be used
as tools, or regarded as agencies, must be treated as enemies. Germany
with her growing population, her advancing industries, her keen
commercial ability, and her ever expanding navy has become the enemy
of civilization. Far too strong to be openly assailed on land she must
at all costs be pent up in Central Europe and by a ring-fence of armed
understandings prohibited from a wider growth that would certainly
introduce a rival factor to those British institutions and that world
language that are seriously if not piously meditated as the ordained
future for mankind.

For English mentality is such that whatever England does is divinely
ordained, and whether she stamps out a nation or merely sinks a ship
the hymn of action is "Nearer My God, to Thee." In a recent deputation
to King George V it will be remembered that certain British religious
bodies congratulated that monarch on the third centenary of the
translation into English of the Bible.

Both the addresses of the subjects, eminent, religious and cultured
men, and the sovereign's reply were highly informative of the mental
attitude of this extraordinary people. The Bible, it appeared, was the
"greatest possession of the English race." "The British Bible" was the
first and greatest of British investments and upon the moral dividends
derived from its possession was founded the imperial greatness of this
Island Empire. That other peoples possessed the Bible and had even
translated it before England was not so much as hinted at. That the
Bible was Greek and Hebrew in origin was never whispered. It began and
ended with the English Authorised Version. The British Bible was the
Bible that counted. It was the Bible upon which the sun never sets,
the Bible that had blown Indian mutineers from its muzzle in
the 'fifties and was prepared to-day to have a shot at any other
mutineers, Teuton or Turk, who dared to dispute its claim that the
meek shall inherit the earth. The unctuous rectitude that converts the
word of God into wadding for a gun is certainly a formidable opponent,
as Cromwell proved. To challenge English supremacy becomes not merely
a threat to peace, it is an act of sacrilege. And yet this world-wide
em