Page 257 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

238 A Twentieth-Century Outlook.

resented, criticised, and condemned by that
school of political thought which assumes for
itself the title of economical, which attained its
maturity, and still lives, amid the ideas of that
stage of industrial progress coincident with
the middle of the century, and which sees all
things from the point of view of production
and of internal development. Powerfully ex-
erted throughout the world, nowhere is the in-
fluence of this school so unchecked and so
injurious as in the United States, because,
having no near neighbors to compete with us
in point of power, military necessities have
been to us not imminent, so that, like all dis-
tant dangers, they have received little regard
;
and also because, with our great resources only
partially developed, the instinct to external ac-
tivities has remained dormant. At the same
period and from the same causes that the
European world turned its eyes inward from
the seaboard, instead of outward, the people
of the United States were similarly diverted
from the external activities in which at the
beginning of the century they had their wealth.
This tendency, emphasized on the political
side by the civil war, was reinforced and has