of Empire; they led through the sacrifice of immediate cheapness to an unparalleled development of national wealth; and in drawing into the hands of this country the undivided sovereignty of the sea, they were—with the possible exception of American Protection—the most powerful economic instrument ever applied to political purposes.
We have now to face the problem in a larger shape. Sea-power has become a highly specialized form of force, far less intimately connected than in Nelson's days with the merchant marine, and depending more generally upon the financial and constructive resources—the taxable and technical capacity—of the whole nation behind it. The United States, for instance, has, by comparison, no merchant marine, yet the enormous estimates her internal wealth enables her to vote must make her, at least, the second naval Power in the world. German commercial tonnage is only one-fifth of ours, but her naval budget is already nearly a third as large. Even if the Navigation Laws could be revived in all their old stringency—and this is an impossible supposition—they would be a minor factor in the wider economic struggles now determining the ability of great maritime States to equip fleets and to support the financial strain of modern war. We have half the merchant shipping of the world. In that respect we have reached our maximum, and our percentage is now beginning to show a faint and slow, but unmistakable tendency to recede. But under Protection our chief commercial competitors abroad have developed a financial and technical capacity which enables them for the first time to challenge our naval supremacy in earnest. It is perfectly conceivable that we might retain our present proportion of the world's mercantile tonnage and might, nevertheless, lose our naval supremacy through the eventual ability of some other Power or combination of Powers, increasing more rapidly in population, commerce, and wealth, to create larger fleets than we could afford to sustain.
Success in merchant shipping will no longer suffice unless we can keep pace with our greatest competitors
