Now for a nation existing under conditions such as have been described, where the work and wages and food of the masses of the people depend on easy and constant access to the remotest corners of the globe, it seems possible to indicate what must be the end and aim of national policy--the supreme objects of statesmanship. Surely the first object must be to {111} secure the absolute safety for trading purposes of the water-ways of the world. Maritime security Britain is bound to maintain, if she is to retain manufacturing superiority. The only manufacturing rival which seriously threatens her is the United States. It is a friendly rivalry, and should remain such. But each country, with what advantages it has, will play relentlessly for its own hand, and for the welfare, real or supposed, of its own people. Britain carries on the contest by means of Free Trade, thereby cheapening production, and winning the market of the world. The United States use for their weapon Protection, stimulating production till it becomes cheap. Britain also, under this opposing condition, depends for food and material on the outside world--the United States have the food and most of the material within themselves. The first serious break in Britain's power to hold the waterways of the world would place her at a fatal disadvantage. Safe in a continental isolation the United States could supply the customers who came to her for manufactured goods with what they wanted. To be on even terms Britain must have maritime security, and this she could not have if by the successive cutting away of her great outlying offshoots she should lose control of those points of vantage which now are the secret of her supremacy quite as much as the ships which she sends forth from her dockyards. Second only to maritime security seems to me the necessity for a country in the position of Great Britain {112} to keep as far as possible the sources from which she draws her food and raw material within the national domain.