That war was the first ever waged exclusively for territory and commerce; the first European war without dynastic causes or objects. Its results were, territorially, the expulsion of French power from North America, and the reduction of French pretensions in India to the possession, by sufferance, of two trading posts; and, commercially, the practical destruction of every other merchant marine that had been serionsly competing with the English. England then, for the first time, applied sea power directly and avowedly to the objects of aggrandizement on the land and expansion of carrying trade on the ocean. It made her supreme in North America, laid broad and deep the foundations of her empire in India, and converted the Atlantic and Indian oceans into English waterways!

This "old French war," the first of the series of great wars for territorial aggrandizement and commercial expansion, inaugurated an epoch of war, broken only by short intervals of armed truce or fitful peace, which lasted for sixty years-from 1755 to 1815. The analogy of purpose and the coincidence of [result are clearly traceable through this period from Wolfe at Quebec to Wellington at Waterloo, and from Hawke in Quiberon Bay to Nelson at Trafalgar. That is to say, during these sixty years, and without serious check by even so tremendous an event as the successful revolt of her American colonies, England was fighting everybody, from France singly to the world in arms, for the one object of sea domination. And she gained it.

The visible results, far more important in the money sense than territorial empire, are a control of the world's carrying trade that compels every people who have anything to sell or buy pay toll to her on her own terms; a master-voice in every international question or controversy; a dictatorship of values and an arbitership of exchanges the globe over. These results

to

are the product of the genius of a race exerted through generations of men; the trophy of the prowess of a people exhibited through centuries aud the fruit of a national wisdom unparalleled in the annals of mankind.

Having surveyed from the external point of view the processes which ended in England's victory over all rivals on the sea, we may consider the material conditions under which it was achieved and the mechanical obstacles in the face of which it

was won,

England gained the empire of the ocean in the days of "wooden walls." The ships that she did it with were, without exception, either built in her own shipyards or captured from her enemies. But, of the principal shipbuilding materials which she needed, her own soil produced in 1794 less than one-third and in 1815 less than one-eighth. One of the most eminent historians of British naval architecture says that two of the newer 74-gun ships which fought at Trafalgar, "though built at Chatham and Deptford respectively, had hardly a stick of English timber in them, and, in fact, about the only English product they used was the iron of which their guns and cannon-balls were made!"

At no time after the middle of the eighteenth century did England produce ship timber enough to maintain the material of her navy and merchant marine. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the home supply was practically exhausted. But England bought no ships. She bought ship timber everywhere, carried it to English shipyards, and with it still built her own ships. In the most critical period of her greatest struggle, and at the extreme of her poverty in ship timber, she not only bought no foreign-built ships for her navy, but threw every conceivable obstacle in the way of the purchase of foreign-built ships by her private merchants, and prohibited the East India Company, over which the government had certain control, from buying or using foreign-built ships at all.

Early in the nineteenth century this policy became extremely oppressive to British shipowners and taxpayers. Merchants became tired of paying at the rate of $90 per ton for English-built ships made of imported timber, when they could buy Americanbuilt ships of equal or better quality for $50 to $55 per ton. So utterly was England dependent upon other countries for ship timber that vessels were constructed expressly for carrying it. This state of things caused efforts on the part of shipowners to secure legislation that would remove the vexatious restrictions and oppressive obstacles imposed upon purchased ships of foreign build. These efforts availed nothing. The determined policy of England was an unalterable resolve to maintain home shipbuilding at all hazards and at any cost.

The statesmen of England clearly perceived that, while the monopoly of ocean commerce for which they were fighting the VOL. CLXV.-No. 492.

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world at large must rest on sea power, the sea power itself must rest on home shipbuilding. From this clear view they were not to be led away, and from their steadfast policy they were not to be diverted by any mystic theories or by any transcendental doctrines. They cared not where the trees might grow, or what it might cost to bring their timber to British shipyards. Whatever the origin or the expense of the raw material, the ships must be built in England. In the darkest hours, and in the direst straits, England clung doggedly to her traditional policy, inflicting upon her shipowners and her taxpayers enormous burdens in the cost of home-built ships from imported timber, and grimly frowning upon the purchase of cheaper ships of foreign build.

It might be interesting but it would not be profitable to speculate as to how long English shipbuilding, and with it the foundation of her sea power, could have withstood this distressing strain. Suffice it to say that there were no symptoms of approach to the breaking point, when, in the first part of the last half of this century, England abandoned wood and adopted iron as the prime material of shipbuilding. This change at once altered England's status from that of a total non-producer of shipbuilding material in wood to that of the foremost producer of it in iron, and thereby at once transformed her condition from that of extreme difficulty to that of extreme advantage.

But the change from wood to iron was only one among a number of events highly favorable to the expansion of England's sea power which took place about the same time. The United States, which at that time was her most formidable competitor in ocean traffic, became involved in civil strife, which not only diverted all our resources of sea power from commerce to warfare, but also, either by capture or by transfer to neutral flags to avoid capture, practically destroyed our merchant fleet.

On the termination of the civil strife an era of vast internal improvement set in, and the energy, ambition, and capital of the whole American nation was absorbed in railway development to the exclusion of almost all other objects. These conditions lasted about a quarter of a century without interruption. In the meantime England was exerting every energy, employing every resource and directing every ambition to the extension of her commercial sea power in all its components. In other words, while the United States was developing a great and perfect sys

tem of land transportation throughout a part of one continent, England was developing a great and perfect system of sea transportation throughout the globe, pre-empting all seas and laying all continents under contribution. The comparative importance of the results is in the ratio of the relative extent of the respective fields of enterprise. Our internal development on the land, though vast, is limited geographically, and its possible expansion, therefore, has boundaries. England's external development on the sea is not limited and has no boundaries. Our internal development earns its profit from our own people. England's external development earns its profit from all peoples.

Necessarily, the revenues of such an empire must be the receipts of the traffic of which it is the thoroughfare. England not only controls the thoroughfare, but she owns the vehicles by means of which its traffic is conducted. Or if any other nation owns a few of such vehicles, England builds them, with exceptions too trifling for serious consideration in such a vast sum . total.

The land part of the British Empire, though it embraces a considerable fraction of the habitable surface of the earth and more than one-fifth of the human race, need not be separately considered in this survey. The British Islands are, in brief, the workshop and arsenal of the Empire-its fortress or place d'armes, unassailable and impregnable in any military sense. But, in the commercial and financial sense, those parts of the land surface of the globe which England governs directly are no worse off than those which maintain governments of their own. The jurisdiction and power of all alike cease three miles from their shores, and England's sea power at that point bounds them all.

In my former paper I stated that British ships now carry more than seven-tenths of the ocean-borne commerce of the world. The earnings of her commercial fleet, including the accessories of banking, insurance, and commission, exceed eight hundred millions of dollars a year, net cash. Of this the United States contributes, roundly, three hundred millions annually, or an amount equal to about three-fifths of our national revenue.

Some economists argue that this is all right because we get "value received" in the transport of our exports and imports. This fallacy is at once exploded by the well-known commercial

fact that the cargo pays the freight as absolutely as the passenger pays his passage; and, therefore, the entire increment being foreign, the effect upon us is a continuous drain or outgo of money both ways. There is, however, a simpler mode of stating the problem. If our commerce, which is now carried in English ships, were carried in American ships, the money now paid to English owners would be paid to American owners. It would, therefore, stay in the country as part of its earned increment, instead of going out of the country to swell the earned increment of England.

Let us see what this means as an aggregate. In 1867 we were paying England at the rate of $112,000,000 a year for carrying our ocean commerce. In 1896 we paid her $300,000,000. The increase during the thirty years has been steady, and the average is a little over $200,000,000 a year. That is to say, in the thirty years six billions of dollars have passed from American to English hands for ocean tolls and passages; a net tax levied on the products of our country that we sell, and on the products of other countries that we buy.

From this tax there is no escape so long as we employ English ships to carry our commerce. We do not get this money back by sale of our products to England. What we get for those products is the English market price less the freight and accessory charges. That deduction is the profit of the English common carrier and goes into the volume of his accumulated wealth. We cannot get any of it except by borrowing. The money that English bankers have loaned us to build our railways with is the money that we have paid to English shipowners for carrying our over-sea freight and passengers.

Thus, even in our internal development itself, the consequences of England's commercial and financial sea power are felt none the less potently because indirectly applied. Our internal development in railways during the last third of this century far outstripped the conditions of natural growth or normal expansion, and it was necessarily prosecuted to a very great extent upon borrowed capital. The railroad building generation of the epoch under consideration mortgaged not only its own earnings but those of remote posterity to the extent of about five billions of dollars of bonded debt, and for more than seven-tenths of this amount England was the mortgagee. In other words, England