Venezuela because the matter to her was not worth war. Great
Britain is gorged with land. Her statesmen are weary of looking after
it, and of the persistence with which one advance compels another. It
is not so with Germany and France. The latter is traditionally our
friend, however, and her ambitions, even when she held Canada, have
ever pointed east rather than west. But how about Germany? It is the
fashion here to proclaim the Emperor a fool, for his shibboleth is
imperialistic and not republican; but if he be, it is with the folly
of the age on the European Continent--the hunger for ships, colonies,
and commerce, after which the great Napoleon so hankered, and upon
which the prosperity of Great Britain has been built.

Ships, colonies, commerce, mean to a European nation of to-day just
what our vast, half-improved, heavily tariffed territory means to us.
They mean to those nations room to expand, land wherewith to portion
off the sons and daughters that cannot find living space at home,
widespread political and international influence, through blood
affiliation with prosperous colonies, the power of which, in the
sentiment of brotherhood, received such illustration in the Queen's
Jubilee--one of the most majestic sights of the ages; for no Roman
triumph ever equalled for variety of interest the Jubilee, in which
not victorious force, but love, the all-powerful, was the tie that
knit the diversities of the great pageant into one coherent, living
whole. What political power is stable save that which holds men's
hearts? And what holds men's hearts like blood-relationship, permitted
free course and given occasional manifestation and exchange? German
colonies, like unto those of Great Britain--such is the foolish
day-dream of the German Emperor, if folly it be; but if he be a fool,
he knows at least that reciprocal advantage, reciprocal interests,
promote the exchange of kindly offices, by which has been kept alive
the love between Englishmen at home and Englishmen in the colonies. He
knows, also, that such advantages derive from power, from force--not
force exerted necessarily but force possessed--and that force, power,
depends not upon fleets and armies only, but upon positions also--war
being, as Napoleon used to say, "a business of positions"--one of
those pregnant phrases of the great captain upon which a man may
meditate many hours without exhausting it. A state that aims at
maritime power and at colonial empire,