ntial than care
for the public interest was also active, for the abundance of
ship-building materials and a relative fewness of other investments
made shipping a profitable private interest. How changed the present
condition is, all know. The centre of power is no longer on the
seaboard. Books and newspapers vie with one another in describing the
wonderful growth, and the still undeveloped riches, of the interior.
Capital there finds its best investments, labor its largest
opportunities. The frontiers are neglected and politically weak; the
Gulf and Pacific coasts actually so, the Atlantic coast relatively to
the central Mississippi Valley. When the day comes that shipping again
pays, when the three sea frontiers find that they are not only
militarily weak, but poorer for lack of national shipping, their
united efforts may avail to lay again the foundations of our sea
power. Till then, those who follow the limitations which lack of sea
power placed upon the career of France may mourn that their own
country is being led, by a like redundancy of home wealth, into the
same neglect of that great instrument.

Among modifying physical conditions may be noted a form like that of
Italy,--a long peninsula, with a central range of mountains dividing
it into two narrow strips, along which the roads connecting the
different ports necessarily run. Only an absolute control of the sea
can wholly secure such communications, since it is impossible to know
at what point an enemy coming from beyond the visible horizon may
strike; but still, with an adequate naval force centrally posted,
there will be good hope of attacking his fleet, which is at once his
base and line of communications, before serious damage has been done.
The long, narrow peninsula of Florida, with Key West at its
extremity, though flat and thinly populated, presents at first sight
conditions like those of Italy. The resemblance may be only
superficial, but it seems probable that if the chief scene of a naval
war were the Gulf of Mexico, the communications by land to the end of
the peninsula might be a matter of consequence, and open to attack.

When the sea not only borders, or surrounds, but also separates a
country into two or more parts, the control of it becomes not only
desirable, but vitally necessary. Such a physical condition either
gives birth and strength to sea power, or makes the country powerless.
Such is the condition of the present kingdom of Italy, wit