Page 91 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

72 The Isthmus and Sea Power.

tenets, similarly ancient, and imposed with a
like ignorance of a future which is our present,
are invoked freely to forbid this nation from
extending its power and necessary enterprise
into and beyond the seas, to which on every
side it now has attained.
During the critical centuries when Great
Britain was passing through that protracted
phase of her history in which, from one of the
least among states, she became, through the
power of the sea, the very keystone and foun-
—
dation upon which rested the commercial
for a time even the political— fabric of Europe,
the free action of her statesmen and people
was clogged by no uneasy sense that the na-
tional genius was in conflict with artificial,
self-imposed restrictions. She plunged into
the brawl of nations that followed the discovery
of a new world, of an unoccupied if not un-
claimed inheritance, with a vigor and an initia-
tive which gained ever-accelerated momentum

and power as the years rolled by. Far and
wide, in every sea, through every clime, her
seamen and her colonists spread; but while
their political genius and traditions enabled
them, in regions adapted to the physical well-