But if it is necessary that Great Britain should brook no rival at sea it is still more necessary that such a rival, should he arise, should not have naval bases within striking distance of her coast. The great exception has, of course, been France, and for two centuries at least that fact has molded the whole of British policy. Had Germany remained a Continental power and rejected maritime ambition that would still continue to mold British policy.
The French have, and Europe being what it is, will always continue to have the aptitude for the sea, the genius in mechanical invention and the superabundant wealth which between them are the three factors of the great modern fleet. A lengthy coast line training millions of her workers to a seafaring life, a long tradition of naval families, and pioneer in every form of modern naval war from the armor plate to the submarine, is the proof of this, if proof were needed.
As against the presence of some part of the French naval power on an opposing coast across a narrow armed water, the English Channel, Great Britain proceeded, generation after generation, to keep her control an essentially defensive naval force. She did it upon the position that her military effort, and therefore expenditure, should be slight; that her economic as her other energies should be chiefly devoted to her marine.
And though the French in the moments of their greatest prosperity were able, for all their constant military effort, to produce navies that rivaled those of Great Britain, yet Great Britain's effort was the more constant. She never engaged large bodies of men in war; she could take advantage of every French reverse during the two centuries when the French were perpetually engaged in huge Continental conflicts.
Great Britain, in a word, by ceaseless vigilance and at a great expense of energy, managed upon the whole to dominate one branch of the narrow seas, the channel. Upon the other branch, the North Sea, she felt nearly always secure. An exception to this security was found during the brief Dutch period in the seventeenth century and again, much more acutely, when the French were the masters of the Low Countries, and when Napoleon took control of the shipbuilding yards not only from Brest to Dunkirk, but from Dunkirk to the Bight of Heligoland.