Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/93

Rh place for democracies. So much as regards Idealism. But it is equally important that we should bear in mind the new face of Reality. We have been fighting lately, in the close of the War, a straight duel between land-power and sea-power, and sea-power has been laying siege to land-power. We have conquered, but had Germany conquered she would have established her sea-power on a wider base than any in history, and in fact on the widest possible base. The joint continent of Europe, Asia, and Africa, is now effectively, and not merely theoretically, an island. Now and again, lest we forget, let us call it the World-Island in what follows.

One reason why the seamen did not long ago rise to the generalisation implied in the expression 'World-Island,' is that they could not make the round voyage of it. An ice-cap, two thousand miles across, floats on the Polar Sea, with one edge aground on the shoals off the north of Asia. For the common purposes of navigation, therefore, the continent is not an island. The seamen of the last four centuries have treated it as a vast promontory stretching southward from a vague north, as a mountain peak may rise out of the clouds from hidden foundations. Even in the last century, since the opening