Page 35 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

The United States Looking Outward. 19

all states now concede to be a legal exercise
of the national power, even though injurious
to themselves. It is lawful, they say, to do
what we will with our own. Are our people,
however, so unaggressive that they are likely
not to want their own way in matters where

their interests turn on points of disputed right,
or so little sensitive as to submit quietly to
encroachment by others, in quarters where they
long have considered their own influence should
prevail ?
Our self-imposed isolation in the matter of
markets, and the decline of our shipping in-
terest in the last thirty years, have coincided
singularly with an actual remoteness of this
continent from the life of the rest of the world.
The writer has before him a map of the North
and South Atlantic oceans, showing the direc-
tion of the principal trade routes and the pro-
portion of tonnage passing over each ; and it is
curious to note what deserted regions, compara-
tively, are the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean
Sea, and the adjoining countries and islands,
A broad band stretches from our northern
Atlantic coast to the English Channel ; another
as broad from the British Islands to the East,