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.
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 British Navy which in all history has been used for such purely defensive purposes as the British Navy has been used during the present generation, and this moderation I conceive to be due to a clear recognition that morally the claim to supremacy at sea is a challenge which the great rival nations must feel acutely, and which they have a right to feel acutely, and which, therefore, must be softened in every possible way.