proportions.  But improved locomotion meant improved carrying, and commerce received an impetus as remarkable as it was unexpected.  In his fondest fancies James Watt could not have foreseen even the approximate result of his invention, the Hercules which was to spring from the puny child of his brain and hands.  An illuminating spectacle, were it possible, would be afforded by summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an ocean greyhound.  The humblest trimmer would treat him with the indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.

It has ever been the world’s dictum that empire and commerce go hand in hand.  In the past the one was impossible without the other.  Rome gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost both power and trade.  With a just system of economics it is highly probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of the Germanic peoples.  When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire.  In the present, empire and commerce have become interdependent.  Such wonders has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets.  The favoured portions of the earth are occupied.  From their seats in the temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to war hot-footed.  Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the fragments.  There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are yet hungry.  There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in wide-stretching lands, awaiting them.  On either hand they confront the naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser struggle among themselves.  And all the while the planet shrinks beneath their grasp.

Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power must be a sea power.  Upon the control of the sea depends the control of trade.  Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid edifices.  The cities of Italy were the world’s merchants till new trade routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west and fell into other hands.  Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment to the soil, had returned to their ancient element.  With the