fort to retain that mastery of the sea. It is generally
assumed, and the idea is propagated by English agencies, that Europe
owes her burden of armaments to the antagonism between France and
Germany, to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by France, and the spirit and
hope of a _revanche_ thereby engendered. But this antagonism has long
ceased to be the chief factor that moulds European armaments.

Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it proffers
France would ere this have resigned herself, as the two provinces
have done, to the solution imposed by the war of 1870. It is England
and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for
the enormous growth of armaments that now over-shadows continental
civilization. Humanity, hemmed in in Central Europe by a forest of
bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of a larger world by a
forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and
arbitration treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule
ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old
World.

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must
strangle the sea serpent whose coils enfold her shores.

Inspect the foundation of European armaments where we will, and we
shall find that the master builder is he who fashioned the British
Empire. It is that empire, its claim to universal right of pre-emption
to every zone and region washed by the waves and useful and necessary
for the expansion of the white races, and its assertion of a right to
control at will all the seas of all the world that drives the peoples
of Europe into armed camps. The policy of the Boer War is being tried
on a vaster scale against Europe. Just as England beat the Boers by
concentration camps and not by arms, by money and not by men, so she
seeks to-day to erect an armourplate barrier around the one European
people she fears to meet in the field, and to turn all Central Europe
into a vast concentration camp. By use of the longest purse she has
already carried this barrier well towards completion. One gap remains,
and it is to make sure that this opening, too, shall be closed that
she now directs all the force of her efforts. Here the longest purse
is of less avail, so England draws upon another armoury. She appeals
to the longest tongue in history--the longest and something else.

In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with a girdle of
steel it is ne