Page:The empire and the century.djvu/207

 Russia's weakness in the field is but the reflex of the internal weakness of her constitution. The efficiency and devotion of the Japanese army are but the outward signs of a nation that is well covered and inspired by patriotism. Again, the moral qualities most valuable for the purposes of national defence—i.e. self-sacrifice, courage, constancy—are, from another point of view, just those essentials of national character which make a nation worth preserving. And regarding the problem of defence from this point of view, we begin to realize that defence need not be a diversion of the national energies from higher and better aims—a mere payment of insurance, necessary, perhaps, but essentially undesirable—but can be used as a motive power and a stimulus in the development towards a higher form of national organization.

This truth was more fully realized by the original builders of the British Empire than it is to-day. For them foreign relations, defence, and industrial and commercial development formed but one single policy—a policy of which each part was intended to support and stimulate the other. Our ancestors fostered trade and industry deliberately for the sake of national security. But they were not content with fostering it in a general haphazard fashion. They regulated it strictly, regardless sometimes of immediate commercial profit, but always with an eye to the main objects of national greatness and national security. The real motive of the navigation laws was not shipping trade, but naval supremacy. To that object of naval supremacy, again, our whole trade with Northern Europe was subordinated. Subsequently, when we began to find that it was not altogether safe to rely upon the Baltic for our naval stores, we deliberately encouraged in our American Colonies the industries that, in those days, were essential to shipbuilding. In the same spirit, too, the whole of our export and import trade was regulated in order to secure an excess of exports, and thus accumulate the precious metals in this country. This policy was not the out-