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Updated: May 3, 2025
England has triumphed mainly from her position. The qualities of her people have, undoubtedly, counted for much, but her unrivalled position in the lap of the Atlantic, barring the seaways and closing the tideways of Central and North-eastern Europe, has counted for more. With this key she has opened the world to herself and closed it to her rivals.
The explanation just sketched is a justification of England's policy, an attempt to show that in the main she had right on her side. That is only part of the reason why she had allies. The other part is that she was strong and could help them. She had three modes of action. She used her navy to destroy the hostile navy or navies and to obtain control of the seaways.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the pity that fills the heart at such a reflection; at the thought of how this neck of barren hills between two inclement seaways has echoed for three centuries with the uproar of sectarian battle; of how the east wind has carried out the sound of our shrill disputations into the desolate Atlantic, and the west wind has borne it over the German Ocean, as though it would make all Europe privy to how well we Scottish brethren abide together in unity.
On the seventh he began changing his base from Fortress Monroe to White House on the Pamunkey. Here on the sixteenth he was within twenty miles of Richmond, while all the seaways behind him were safe in Union hands. The fate not only of Richmond but of the whole South seemed trembling in the scales. The Northern armies had cleared the Mississippi down to Memphis.
Of this, however, there was not much to be obtained. The Alabama was no sooner under way than the wind began to freshen, and soon increased to a moderate gale. This was accompanied by one of those ugly seaways so common in the North Atlantic, and the vessel rolled and tumbled in a manner sufficiently trying, without the addition of the manifold discomforts inseparably attendant on a first start.
Not the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed British attitude in the present war. The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the Western seaways.
To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle. Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world.
A continuous process of discovery, design and improvement was making accessible power of unimaginable magnitude—with, alas, ecological consequences equally unimagined at the time—especially through the use of cheap fuel and electricity. The “era of the railroad” was far advanced and steamships coursed the seaways of the world.
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