It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be sure that your colours are fast and that the stock of paints wont run out.  England, apart from her own perplexities is now faced with this prospect.  Great Britain can no longer count on Ireland, that most prolific source of supply of her army, navy, and industrial efforts during the last century, while she is faced with a declining birth-rate, due largely, be it noted, to the diminished influx of the Irish, a more prolific and virile race.  While her internal powers of reproduction are failing, her ability to keep those already born is diminishing still more rapidly.  Emigration threatens to remove the surplus of births over deaths.

As long as it was only the population of Ireland that fell (8,500,000 in 1846 to 4,370,000 in 1911), Great Britain was not merely untroubled but actually rejoiced at a decrease in numbers that made the Irish more manageable, and yet just sufficiently starvable to supply her with a goodly surplus for army, navy, and industrial expansion in Great Britain.  Now that the Irish are gone with a vengeance it is being perceived that they did not take their vengeance with them and that the very industrial expansion they built up from their starving bodies and naked limbs contains within itself the seeds of a great retribution.

“Since Free Trade has ruined our agriculture, our army has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, according to the German notion are better at shouting than at fighting.  German generals have pointed out that in the South African war our regular and auxiliary troops often raised the white flag and surrendered, without necessity, sometimes to a few Boers, and they may do the same to a German invading force.  Free Trade which “benefits the consumer” and the capitalist has, unfortunately, through the destruction of our agriculture and through forcing practically the whole population of Great Britain into the towns, destroyed the manhood of the nation.”  (Modern Germany page 251, by J. Ellis Barker, 1907).  An army of slum dwellers is a poor base on which to build the structure of a perpetual world dominion.

While the navy shows an imposing output of new battleships and cruisers for 1913, the record, we are told, of all warship construction in the world, it takes blood as well as iron to cement empires.  Battleships may become so much floating scrap iron (like the Russian fleet at Tsushima), if the men behind the guns lack the right stamina and education.

We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers who are failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers a large number of transfers from the merchant marine to the Royal Navy are being sanctioned.  To this must be added the call of the Great Dominions for men and officers to man their local fleets.  As the vital resources of England become more and more inadequate to meet the menace of German naval and moral strength, she turns her eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the London Daily Telegraph that Mr. Churchill’s scheme of recruiting at Queenstown may furnish “matter for congratulation, as Irish boys make excellent bluejackets happy of disposition, amenable to discipline, and extremely quick and handy.”