picuous, the British will. In the British papers there
has appeared and gained a permanent footing this phrase, "ton for ton."
This means that Britain will go on fighting until she has exacted and
taken over from Germany the exact equivalent of all the British shipping
Germany has submarined. People do not realise that a time may come when
Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all that
they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite content to let
her allies make an advantageous peace and herself still go on fighting
Germany. She does not intend to let that furtively created German
mercantile marine ship or coal or exist upon the high seas--so long as
it can be used as an economic weapon against her. Neither Britain nor
France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the sort.

It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping has
been unpatriotic. She has been the impartial carrier of the whole world.
Her shippers may have served their own profit; they have never served
hers. The fluctuations of freight charges may have been a universal
nuisance, but they have certainly not been an aggressive national
conspiracy. It is Britain's case against any German ascendancy at sea,
an entirely convincing case, that such an ascendancy would be used
ruthlessly for the advancement of German world power. The long-standing
freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present
war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a
bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control
in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world's
trade.

Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of
diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any
stable and generally beneficial solution? What all the neutrals want,
what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries
wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the
"ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor the
"ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the shipping of the
world. The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial
as the Postal Union. What right and reason and the welfare of coming
generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland,
with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking
ring-fence with Warsaw. What e