efore, has enhanced the value of naval power and enabled Great
Britain to reach all over the surface of the earth, and become more
powerful than any continental nation. Thus she has made out of the
very weakness of her position a paramount tower of strength.

Naval defense was taken up systematically in Great Britain in the
eighth century by King Offa, to whom is credited the maxim, "He
who would be secure on land must be supreme at sea"; but it must
have dropped to a low ebb by 1066, for William of Normandy landed
in England unopposed. Since that time Great Britain's naval defense,
committed to her navy, has increased steadily in effectiveness and
power, keeping pace with the increase in the national interests
it defended, and utilizing all the growing resources of wealth
and science which the world afforded. Until the present crisis,
Great Britain's naval defense did its most important work during
Napoleon's time, when Great Britain's standing, like the standing
of every other European nation, was subjected to a strain that
it could hardly bear. So keenly, however, did the nation and the
nation's great leader, Pitt, realize the situation that the most
strenuous measures were adopted to keep the navy up, press-gangs
even visiting the houses of subjects of the King, taking men out and
putting them by force on board his Majesty's ships. But the British
navy, even more than the British army, brought Great Britain safe
out of the Napoleonic danger, and made the British the paramount
nation of the world.

Since then Great Britain has waxed more and more powerful, her
avowed policy being that her navy should be equal to any other two;
realizing that her aloofness in point of national characteristics
and policy from all other nations made it possible that a coalition
of at least two great nations might be pitted against her at a
time when she could not get an ally. Accompanying the growth of
the British navy has been the establishment of British foreign
trade, British colonies, and British bases from which the navy
could work, and the general making of a network of British commerce
and British power over the surface of the earth. No other nation
has ever dominated so large a part of the surface of the globe as
has Great Britain during the last two centuries; and she has done
it by means of her naval power. This naval power has been, in the
language of Great Britain, for the "imperial defense"; not for coast
defense alone,