And so we learn that “Australasia protests” to the Home Government at the mere rumour that France may choose to part with one of her possessions to win German goodwill in Morocco.  Neither France nor Germany can be permitted to be a free agent in a transaction that however regarded as essential to their own interests might affect, even by a shadow on the sea, the world orbit of British interests.  These interests it will be noted have reached such a stage of development as to require that all foreign States that cannot be used as tools, or regarded as agencies, must be treated as enemies.  Germany with her growing population, her advancing industries, her keen commercial ability, and her ever expanding navy has become the enemy of civilization.  Far too strong to be openly assailed on land she must at all costs be pent up in Central Europe and by a ring-fence of armed understandings prohibited from a wider growth that would certainly introduce a rival factor to those British institutions and that world language that are seriously if not piously meditated as the ordained future for mankind.

For English mentality is such that whatever England does is divinely ordained, and whether she stamps out a nation or merely sinks a ship the hymn of action is “Nearer My God, to Thee.”  In a recent deputation to King George V it will be remembered that certain British religious bodies congratulated that monarch on the third centenary of the translation into English of the Bible.

Both the addresses of the subjects, eminent, religious and cultured men, and the sovereign’s reply were highly informative of the mental attitude of this extraordinary people.  The Bible, it appeared, was the “greatest possession of the English race.”  “The British Bible” was the first and greatest of British investments and upon the moral dividends derived from its possession was founded the imperial greatness of this Island Empire.  That other peoples possessed the Bible and had even translated it before England was not so much as hinted at.  That the Bible was Greek and Hebrew in origin was never whispered.  It began and ended with the English Authorised Version.  The British Bible was the Bible that counted.  It was the Bible upon which the sun never sets, the Bible that had blown Indian mutineers from its muzzle in the ’fifties and was prepared to-day to have a shot at any other mutineers, Teuton or Turk, who dared to dispute its claim that the meek shall inherit the earth.  The unctuous rectitude that converts the word of God into wadding for a gun is certainly a formidable opponent, as Cromwell proved.  To challenge English supremacy becomes not merely a threat to peace, it is an act of sacrilege.  And yet this world-wide empire broad based upon the British Bible and the English navy, and maintained by a very inflexible interpretation of the one and a very skilful handling of the other, rests upon a sunk foundation that is older than both and will surely bring both to final shipwreck.