The Navy enabled the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at home, from the ruthless sword of the Mahdi in the Soudan, and from conquest by the Germans or the Turks. The Navy also enabled the Mother Country to change a dozen savage lands into places where people could rise above the level of their former savage lives.
All this meant war. But if these countries had not been brought into the British Empire they could only have had the choice of two evils—either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? The fact is that all the white man's countries of the British Empire overseas are perfectly free commonwealths in which not only those of British blood but those of foreign origin, like Boers and French-Canadians, can live their lives in their own way, without the Mother Country's having the slightest wish or power to force them to give a ship, a dollar, or a man to defend the Empire without which they could not live a day. She protects them for nothing. They join her or not, just as they please. And when they do join her, her Navy is always ready to take their soldiers safe across the sea. No League of Nations could ever better this.
Nor is this the only kind of freedom that flourishes under the White Ensign of the Navy. The oversea Dominions, which govern themselves, make what laws they please about their trade, even to charging duty on goods imported from the Mother Country. But the parts of the Empire which the Mother Country has to rule, (because their people, not being whites, have not yet learnt to rule themselves), also enjoy a wonderful amount of freedom in trade. And foreigners enjoy it too; for they are allowed to trade with the Natives as freely as the British are themselves. Nor is this all. During the hundred and nine years between Trafalgar and the Great War most of the oversea colonies of Holland, Spain, and Portugal could have easily been taken by British joint expeditions. But not one of them was touched.
There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a "scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium) they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming to know the reason why, though the Chinese coast was sixteen thousand miles from England. No, there is no question about the Navy's strong right arm. But it has no thievish fingers.
The Empire has grown by trade rather than by conquest. There have been conquests, plenty of them. But they have been brought on either by the fact that other Powers have tried to shut us out of whole continents, as the Spaniards tried in North and South America, or by fair war, as with the French, or by barbarians and savages who would not treat properly the British merchants with whom they had been very glad to trade. Of course there have been mistakes, and British wrongs as well as British rights. But ask the conquered how they could live their own lives so much in their own way under a flag of their own and without the safeguard of the Royal Navy.
These things being so, the Empire, which is itself the first real League of Nations the world has ever seen, would be wrong to give up any of the countries it holds in trust for their inhabitants; and its enormous size is more a blessing than a curse. The size itself is more than we can quite take in till we measure it by something else we know as being very large indeed. India, for instance, has three times as many people as there are in the whole of the United States; though India is only one of the many countries under the British Crown. So much for population. Now for area. The area added to the British Empire in the last fifty years is larger than that of the whole United States. Yet we don't hear much about it. That is not the British way. The Navy is "The Silent Service."