“It is difficult for the people in England to realize the condition of Northern France at the present time.  Although the papers are full of accounts of desolation and destruction caused by the German invasion, it is only by an actual experience that a full realization of the horror comes.  To return to England after visiting the French war zone is to come back to a land of perfect peace, where everything is normal and where it is not easy to believe we are almost within hearing distance of the cannonade on the Aisne.”

(Sir Alfred Sharpe, to the Daily Chronicle from the Front, September 2nd, 1914.)

It is this immunity from the horror of war that makes all Englishmen jingoes.  They are never troubled by the consequences of belligerency.  Since it is only by “an actual experience that the full realization of the horror comes.”  Until that horror strikes deep on English soil her statesmen, her Ministers, her Members of Parliament, her editors, will never sincerely love peace, but will plan always to ensure war abroad, whenever British need or ambition demands it.

Were England herself so placed that responsibility for her acts could be enforced on her own soil, among her own people, and on the head of those who devise her policies, then we might talk of arbitration treaties with hope, and sign compacts of goodwill sure that they were indeed cordial understandings.

But as long as Great Britain retains undisputed ownership of the chief factor that ensures at will peace or war on others, there can be only armaments in Europe, ill-will among men and war fever in the blood of mankind.

British democracy loves freedom of the sea in precisely the same spirit as imperial Rome viewed the spectacle of Celtic freedom beyond the outposts of the Roman legions; as Agricola phrased it, something “to wear down and take possession of so that freedom may be put out of sight.”

The names change but the spirit of imperial exploitation, whether it call itself an empire or a democracy, does not change.

Just as the Athenian Empire, in the name of a democracy, sought to impose servitude at sea on the Greek world, so the British Empire, in the name of a democracy, seeks to encompass mankind within the long walls of London.

The modern Sparta may be vanquished by the imperial democrats assailing her from East and West.  But let the world be under no illusions.

If Germany go down to-day, vanquished by a combination of Asiatic, African, American, Canadian and European enemies, the gain will not be to the world nor to the cause of peace.

The mistress of the seas will remain to ensure new combinations of enmity to prohibit the one league of concord that alone can bring freedom and peace to the world.  The cause that begot this war will remain to beget new wars.

The next victim of universal sea-power may not be on the ravaged fields of mid-Europe, but mid the wasted coasts and bombarded seaports of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.