Some such obscure argument as this controls the Englishman’s reasoning when he faces the growing magnitude of the Teutonic people.  A bitter resentment, with fear at the bottom, a hurried clanging of bolt and rivet in the belt of a new warship and a muffled but most diligent hammering at the rivets of an ever building American Alliance—­the real Dreadnought this, whose keel was laid sixteen years ago and whose slow, secret construction has cost the silent swallowing of many a cherished British boast.

English Liberalism might desire a different sort of reckoning with Germany, but English Liberalism is itself a product of the English temperament, and however it may sigh, by individuals, for a better understanding between the two peoples, in the mass, it is a part of the national purpose and a phase of the national mind and is driven relentlessly to the rivets and the hammering, the “Dreadnoughts” in being and that mightier Dreadnought yet to be, the Anglo-Saxon Alliance which Germany must fight if she is to get out.

Doubtless she has already a naval policy and the plans for a naval war, for the fight will be settled on the sea, but the fate will be determined on an island.

The Empire that has grown from an island and spread with the winds and the waves to the uttermost shores will fight and be fought for on the water and will be ended where it began, on an island.

That island, I believe, will be Ireland and not Great Britain.

Chapter III

THE BALANCE OF POWER

A conflict between England and Germany exists already, a conflict of aims.

England rich, prosperous, with all that she can possibly assimilate already in her hands, desires peace on present conditions of world power.  These conditions are not merely that her actual possessions should remain intact, but that no other Great Power shall, by acquiring colonies and spreading its people and institutions into neighbouring regions, thereby possibly affect the fuller development of those pre-existing British States.  For, with England equality is an offence and the Power that arrives at a degree of success approximating to her own and one capable of being expanded into conditions of fair rivalry, has already committed the unpardonable sin.  As Curran put it in his defence of Hamilton Rowan in 1797, “England is marked by a natural avarice of freedom which she is studious to engross and accumulate, but most unwilling to impart; whether from any necessity of her policy or from her weakness, or from her pride, I will not presume to say.”

Thus while England might even be the attacking party, and in all probability will be the attacking party, she will embark on a war with Germany at an initial disadvantage.  She will be on her defence.  Although, probably, the military aggressor from reasons of strategy, she will be acting in obedience to an economic policy of defence and not of attack.  Her chief concern will be not to advance and seize, always in war the more inspiring task, but to retain and hold.  At best she could come out of the war with no new gain, with nothing added worth having to what she held on entering it.  Victory would mean for her only that she had secured a further spell of quiet in which to consolidate her strength and enjoy the good things already won.