These three causes are:

1. The fixed cardinal point for English policy upon which no English
patriot worthy of the name would hesitate for a moment, and which no
historian with any sense of justice can condemn, to wit, that no one, if
England can help it, shall have naval predominance over the British
fleet, particularly in the narrow seas.

2. The effect of certain undertakings, a whole network of diplomatic
actions, particularly in connection with France, engaged in by the
English Foreign Office during the last ten years.

3. A certain vague attachment to the Western, or Latin, tradition of
civilization with its routine of conventions in war and peace, and
particularly of treaties as between first-class powers. This tradition
was still sufficiently strong to act as a motive converging with the two
others mentioned above to produce a sufficient moral stream in favor of
war as, though sluggish, to help to turn the scale.

I say that these three things combined, upon the whole and doubtfully,
discovered a sufficient strength between them to make the English
politicians, after serious hesitation and close division, determine upon
war.

Let me take them in their order:

1. The cardinal point of statesmanship upon which all English foreign
policy has turned for two hundred years, that no one shall be more
powerful at sea than England, especially upon the shores of the narrow
seas, appears to foreigners unarguably arrogant.

It is, indeed, of its nature a challenge to the rest of the world, but
if the reader will consider a moment he will see that it is a challenge
to which modern England, at any rate, is inexorably condemned. However
much such a position may clash with the temperament of chivalrous and
peaceable men--and it does clash with the temperament of many an English
statesman of the past and of the present--no one with a respect for his
country, or paying the common duty of allegiance to it, can compromise
upon the matter. It is here with England precisely as it has been with
all her parallels, the great oligarchic commercial commonwealths of the
past; she lives by the sea, and the closing of the sea would be to her
not inconvenience, but death.

It is, I think, this very sentiment that England can live only on
condition that the English fleet is supreme which has led England to use
that supremacy so sparingly. It is true to say that there has been no
force of so much superiority to its rivals as the Bri