The policy of a nation is determined upon, so as to accord with what it conceives to be its honour, safety, and material interests. In the natural course of events this policy may check, or be checked by, the policy of some other nation. The efforts of diplomacy may be successful in clearing away these obstructions. If so, well and good; but if not, there is nothing left to decide the issue between the two nations but the stern arbitrament of war.
Moreover, diplomacy itself is dependent upon armaments in somewhat the same sense as the prosperity of a merchant is dependent upon his credit with his bankers. The news system of the world has undergone a revolution since the days before steam and telegraphs. It is not merely more rapid, but much ampler. The various governments are kept far more fully informed of one another's affairs, and as a consequence the great issues between nations have become clear and sharp. The most crafty and smooth-tongued ambassador can rarely wheedle his opponents into concessions which are contrary to their interests, unless he has something more to rely upon than his own guile and plausibility. Army corps and battle fleets looming in the distance are better persuaders than the subtlest arguments and the deftest flattery.
What, then, is the position of a statesman who finds himself confronted by a clash of policies, if, when the diplomatic deadlock occurs, he realises that his armaments are insufficient to support his aim? In such an event he is faced with the alternative of letting judgment go by default, or of adding almost certain military disaster to the loss of those political stakes for which his nation is contending with its rival. Such a position must be ignominious in the extreme; it might even be ruinous; and yet it would be the inevitable fate of any country whose ministers had neglected the maxim that policy in the last resort is dependent upon armaments.
EXAMPLE OF CHINA
If we are in search of an example we shall find it ready to our hand. The Empire of China is comparable to our own at least in numbers; for each of them contains, as nearly as may be, one quarter of the whole human race. And as China has hitherto failed utterly to make her armaments sufficient, under the stress of modern conditions, to support even that meek and passive policy of possession which she has endeavoured to pursue, so she has been compelled to watch in helplessness while her policy has been disregarded by every adventurer. She has been pressed by all the nations of the world and obliged to yield to their demands. Humiliating concessions have been wrung from her; favours even more onerous, in the shape of loans, have been forced upon her. The resources with which nature has endowed her have been exploited by foreigners against her will. Her lands have been shorn from her and parcelled out among those who were strong, and who hungered after them. This conquest and robbery has proceeded both by wholesale and retail. Because she yielded this to one claimant, another, to keep the balance even, has insisted upon that. Safe and convenient harbours, fortified places, islands, vast stretches of territory, have been demanded and taken from her almost without a struggle; and all this time she has abstained with a timid caution from anything which can justly be termed provocation. For more than half a century, none the less, China has not been mistress in her own house.
The reason of this is plain enough—China had possessions which other nations coveted, and she failed to provide herself with the armaments which were necessary to maintain them.
The British people likewise had possessions which other nations coveted—lands to take their settlers, markets to buy their goods, plantations to yield them raw materials. If it were our set determination to hold what our forefathers won, two things were necessary: the first, that our policy should conform to this aim; the second, that our armaments should be sufficient to support our policy.
A nation which desired to extend its possessions, to round off its territories, to obtain access to the sea, would probably regard conquest, or at all events absorption, as its highest immediate interest. This would be the constant aim of its policy, and if its armaments did not conform to this policy, the aim would not be realised. Examples both of failure and success are to be found in the history of Russia from the time of Peter the Great, and in that of Prussia from the days of the Great Elector.
A nation—like England or Holland in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries—which was seeking to secure against its commercial rivals, if necessary by force of arms, new markets among civilised but unmilitary races, would require a policy and armaments to correspond.
BRITISH CONTENTMENT