The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security for the peace of the world.... If you rub it in, both at home and abroad, that you are ready for instant war, with every unit of your strength in the first line and waiting to be first in, and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down, and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any), and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you. Would Admiral Fisher refrain from taking a given line merely because, if he took it, someone would "hit him in the belly," etc.? He would repudiate the idea with the utmost scorn, and probably reply that the threat would give him an added incentive to take the line in question. But why should Admiral Fisher suppose that he has a monopoly of courage, and that a German Admiral would act otherwise than he? Is it not about time that each nation abandoned the somewhat childish assumption that it has a monopoly of the courage and the persistence in the world, and that things which would never frighten or deter it will frighten and deter its rivals? Yet in this matter the English assume either that the Germans will be less persistent than they, or that in this contest their backs will break first. A coadjutor of Lord Roberts is calmly talking of a Naval Budget of 400 or 500 million dollars, and universal service as well, as a possibility of the all but immediate future.[118] If England can stand that now, why should not Germany, who is, we are told, growing industrially more rapidly than the English, be able to stand as much? But when she has arrived at that point, the English, at the same rate, must have a naval budget of anything from 750 to 1000 million dollars, a total armament budget of something in the region of 1250 millions. The longer it goes on, the worse will be England's relative position, because she has imposed on herself a progressive handicap. The end can only be conflict, and already the policy of precipitating that conflict is raising its head. Sir Edmund C. Cox writes in the premier English review, the _Nineteenth Century_, for April, 1910: