ould only have had the choice of two
evils--either to have remained lands of blood and savagery or to have
been bullied by the Germans. And if the British do not make friends of
those they conquer, how is it that so many Natives fought for them
without being in any way forced to do so, and how is it that the same
Boer commander-in-chief who fought against the British in the Boer War
led a Boer army on the British side against the Germans? The fact is
that all the white man's countries of the British Empire overseas are
perfectly free commonwealths in which not only those of British blood
but those of foreign origin, like Boers and French-Canadians, can live
their lives in their own way, without the Mother Country's having the
slightest wish or power to force them to give a ship, a dollar, or a
man to defend the Empire without which they could not live a day. She
protects them for nothing. They join her or not, just as they please.
And when they do join her, her Navy is always ready to take their
soldiers safe across the sea. No League of Nations could ever better
this.

Nor is this the only kind of freedom that flourishes under the White
Ensign of the Navy. The oversea Dominions, which govern themselves,
make what laws they please about their trade, even to charging duty on
goods imported from the Mother Country. But the parts of the Empire
which the Mother Country has to rule, (because their people, not being
whites, have not yet learnt to rule themselves), also enjoy a wonderful
amount of freedom in trade. And foreigners enjoy it too; for they are
allowed to trade with the Natives as freely as the British are
themselves. Nor is this all. During the hundred and nine years
between Trafalgar and the Great War most of the oversea colonies of
Holland, Spain, and Portugal could have easily been taken by British
joint expeditions. But not one of them was touched.

There never was the slightest doubt that the Navy's long arm could
reach all round the Seven Seas. When the Emperor of Abyssinia
imprisoned British subjects wrongly and would not let them go, the Navy
soon took an army to the east coast of Africa and kept it supplied till
it had marched inland, over the mountains, and brought the prisoners
back. When the Chinese Mandarins treated a signed agreement like a
"scrap of paper" (as the Germans treated the neutrality of Belgium)
they presently found a hundred and seventy-three British vessels coming
to know