e sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be
made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'

The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's
activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its
effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind,
to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one
place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of
internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that
internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history
of this development,

Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of
land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the
Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey
he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the
narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the
East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople,
so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland
the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias
saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his
master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that
India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached,
named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No
fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in
the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink
of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had
enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the
World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken
again so long as the World endures. That good rather than
evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human
responsibilities.[55]

The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in
these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and
land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and
could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British
Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming,
predominantly a sea-power.

How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this
new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's
heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good.
The first explorers, and the