Page 272 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 253

of communism as an aggressive social force.
Communities which want and cannot have,
except by force, will take by force, unless
they are restrained by force ; nor will it be
unprecedented in the history of the world
that the flood of numbers should pour over
and sweep away the barriers which intelligent
foresight, like Caesars, may have erected
against them. Still more will this be so if
the barriers have ceased to be manned — for-
saken or neglected by men in whom the proud
combative spirit of their ancestors has given
way to the cry for the abandonment of mili-
tary preparation and to the decay of warlike
habits.
Nevertheless, even under such conditions,
— which obtained increasingly during the de-
cline of the Roman Empire, — positions suit-
ably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will
do much to retard and, by gaining time, to
modify the disaster to the one party, and
to convert the general issue to the benefit of
the world. Hence the immense importance
of discerning betimes what the real value of
positions is, and where occupation should
betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is the