England needs a two-power navy because she has Africa, India and
Atlantic Canada to defend. America needs a two-power Pacific navy
because she has, as a foster mother of civilization, to help defend
Australia, South America, the Philippines, Pacific Canada and
republican China. Looked upon in this way, a navy becomes a policeman,
and not a swashbuckler. Money is going to be invested to develop all
these countries, and property should be protected, not looted. Those
nations which have the most efficient naval police, and the most
altruistic policies, are the nations which should patrol, and they are
America, Britain and possibly Germany, if the last nation advances, as
it seems now to be doing, in parliamentarism to real representation.
America and Lloyd George’s Britain alone are essentially democracies,
and therefore qualify in international altruism. With Britain’s control
of the Suez Canal, and America’s ownership of the Panama Canal,
efficiency is assured in these two nations effectively standing by
to protect political progress and world commerce on a fuller and
freer basis than it has ever been. In amenability and high mechanical
intelligence, Britain, America and Germany alone have qualified in the
management of navies.
Japan and America will not fight on the Pacific, as Count von Reventlow
and Homer Lea prophesy, but America will overbuild Japan instead. Japan
has been more carefully reading the new lesson taught by America and
Britain that there must be no absorption of old China, and she is now
thinking of a possible new rôle, as the interpreter of the East to the
West, and the West to the East. The head of the First Imperial College,
Doctor Nitobe, the coiner of “Bushido”, is foremost in propagating this
idea. Japanese school-teachers are most numerous in Chinese government
schools, especially as teachers of English, in learning which, however,
they are not half so expert as the Chinese themselves. Doctor Nitobe is
a Christian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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