Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world.  The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan “gift” of a battleship come as fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of die German people.

We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval developments portend the coming of the day when “the Imperial navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the peace of the streets.  The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas.” (Review of Reviews, December, 1912.)

The naive arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English.  It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the Kreuz Zeitung already quoted.  It does not stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any English paper—­Liberal as much as Conservative—­every day in the week.  Nothing is clearer than that no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent inferiority.  Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the Daily News we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgecumbe), addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman would dream of giving public utterance to.  Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary tax imposed upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their English administration.

Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these poor workers nourished a reverence “bordering on veneration” for the Englishman.  “This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to call any European ‘a white man’ save the Englishman alone.  The German trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in their speech coloured men.”

After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the present writer’s view that they are non-Europeans.

Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world affairs that can be dominated by sea power.  Lands and peoples held for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe.  So be it.

With settlement of the Eastern question by this act of restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision to deal with the Western question by a similar act of restoration.