Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it proffers France would ere this have resigned herself, as the two provinces have done, to the solution imposed by the war of 1870.  It is England and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for the enormous growth of armaments that now over-shadows continental civilization.  Humanity, hemmed in in Central Europe by a forest of bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of a larger world by a forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and arbitration treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old World.

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must strangle the sea serpent whose coils enfold her shores.

Inspect the foundation of European armaments where we will, and we shall find that the master builder is he who fashioned the British Empire.  It is that empire, its claim to universal right of pre-emption to every zone and region washed by the waves and useful and necessary for the expansion of the white races, and its assertion of a right to control at will all the seas of all the world that drives the peoples of Europe into armed camps.  The policy of the Boer War is being tried on a vaster scale against Europe.  Just as England beat the Boers by concentration camps and not by arms, by money and not by men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armourplate barrier around the one European people she fears to meet in the field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast concentration camp.  By use of the longest purse she has already carried this barrier well towards completion.  One gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, too, shall be closed that she now directs all the force of her efforts.  Here the longest purse is of less avail, so England draws upon another armoury.  She appeals to the longest tongue in history—­the longest and something else.

In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with a girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States with a girdle of lies.  With America true to the great policy of her great founder, an America, “the friend of all powers but the ally of none,” English designs against European civilization must in the end fail.  Those plans can succeed only by active American support, and to secure this is now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill.  Every tool of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, from the trained envoy to the boy scout and the minor poet has been tried in turn.  The pulpit, the bar, the press; the society hostess, the Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet Minister’s wife, the ex-Cabinet Minister and the Royal Family itself, and last, but not least, even “Irish nationality”—­all have been pilgrims to that shrine; and each has been carefully primed, loaded, well aimed, and then turned full on the weak spots in the armour of republican simplicity.