All the rest of the story seems to be purely legendary. Our real “island story”--as events during the next few hundred years following Alfred clearly indicate--is not that of a people born to the sea; but the story of a people forced thereto by circumstances and the need of self-preservation. It is a very unromantic beginning. There is a strange analogy between it and the beginning in later days of the Sea Power of the other “Island Empire”--Japan. Japan to-day seeks--as we for centuries have sought--for an historical sequence of the “sea spirit” and all such things as an ideal islander should possess. Neither we nor they have ever understood or ever properly realised that it was the Continentals who long ago first saw that it was necessary to command the sea to attack the islanders. The more obvious contrary has always been assumed. It has never been held, or even suggested, that the Little Englander protesting against “bloated naval armaments,” so far from being a modern anachronism, an ultra-Radical or Socialist exotic, may really claim to be the true exponent of “the spirit of the Islanders” for all time. That is one reason why (excluding the mythical Minos of Crete) only two island-groups have ever loomed big in the world’s history. When Wilhelm II of Germany said: “_Unsere Zukunft liegt auf dem Wasser_,” he uttered a far more profound truth than has ever been fully realised. Fleets came into being to attack Islanders with. The Islanders saw the sea primarily as a protection existing between them and the enemy. To the Continental the sea was a road to, or obstacle between him and the enemy, only if the enemy filled it with ships. The Islanders have ever tended to trust to the existence of the sea itself as a defence, except in so far as they have been taught otherwise by individuals who realised the value of shipping. Those millions of British citizens who to-day are more or less torpid on the subject of naval defence are every whit as normal as those Germans who, in season and out, preach naval expansion. The explanation of all this is probably to be found in the fact that the earliest warfare known either to Continentals or to Islanders was _military warfare_. The ship as at first employed was used entirely as a means of transport for reaching the enemy--first, presumably, against outlying islands near the coast, later for more over-sea expeditions. Ideas of attack are earlier than ideas of defence, and the primary idea of defence went no further than the passive defensive. King Alfred, merely in realising the offensive defensive, did a far greater thing than any of the legendary exploits associated with his history. The idea was submerged many a time in the years that followed, but from time to time it appeared and found its ultimate fruition in the Royal Navy.