For my third instance I would step from a matter as small as three market towns and the grazing of a few thousand head of sheep to a matter as big as the world.  What is going to happen to the shipping of the world after this war?  The Germans, with that combination of cunning and stupidity which baffles the rest of mankind, have set themselves to destroy the mercantile marine not merely of Britain and France but of Norway and Sweden, Holland, and all the neutral countries.  The German papers openly boast that they are building up a big mercantile marine that will start out to take up the world’s overseas trade directly peace is declared.  Every such boast receives careful attention in the British press.  We have heard a very great deal about the German will-to-power in this war, but there is something very much older and tougher and less blatant and conspicuous, the British will.  In the British papers there has appeared and gained a permanent footing this phrase, “ton for ton.”  This means that Britain will go on fighting until she has exacted and taken over from Germany the exact equivalent of all the British shipping Germany has submarined.  People do not realise that a time may come when Germany will be glad and eager to give Russia, France and Italy all that they require of her, when Great Britain may be quite content to let her allies make an advantageous peace and herself still go on fighting Germany.  She does not intend to let that furtively created German mercantile marine ship or coal or exist upon the high seas—­so long as it can be used as an economic weapon against her.  Neither Britain nor France nor Italy can tolerate anything of the sort.

It has been the peculiar boast of Great Britain that her shipping has been unpatriotic.  She has been the impartial carrier of the whole world.  Her shippers may have served their own profit; they have never served hers.  The fluctuations of freight charges may have been a universal nuisance, but they have certainly not been an aggressive national conspiracy.  It is Britain’s case against any German ascendancy at sea, an entirely convincing case, that such an ascendancy would be used ruthlessly for the advancement of German world power.  The long-standing freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch.  So beyond the present war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world’s trade.

Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any stable and generally beneficial solution?  What all the neutrals want, what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the “ascendancy” of Germany nor the “ascendancy” of Great Britain nor the “ascendancy” of any state