s outward
voyage.

In the separate publication of these pages, my intention and hope are
to bring home incidentally to American readers this vast extent of
the struggle to which our own Declaration of Independence was but the
prelude; with perchance the further needed lesson for the future,
that questions the most remote from our own shores may involve us
in unforeseen difficulties, especially if we permit a train of
communication to be laid by which the outside fire can leap step by
step to the American continents. How great a matter a little fire
kindleth! Our Monroe Doctrine is in final analysis merely the
formulation of national precaution that, as far as in its power
to prevent, there shall not lie scattered about the material which
foreign possessions in these continents might supply for the extension
of combustion originating elsewhere; and the objection to Asiatic
immigration, however debased by less worthy feelings or motives, is
on the part of thinking men simply a recognition of the same danger
arising from the presence of an inassimilable mass of population,
racially and traditionally distinct in characteristics, behind which
would lie the sympathies and energy of a powerful military and naval
Asiatic empire.

Conducive as each of these policies is to national safety and peace
amid international conflagration, neither the one nor the other can be
sustained without the creation and maintenance of a preponderant navy.
In the struggle with which this book deals, Washington at the
time said that the navies had the casting vote. To Arnold on Lake
Champlain, to DeGrasse at Yorktown, fell the privilege of exercising
that prerogative at the two great decisive moments of the War. To the
Navy also, beyond any other single instrumentality, was due eighty
years later the successful suppression of the movement of Secession.
The effect of the blockade of the Southern coasts upon the financial
and military efficiency of the Confederate Government has never
been closely calculated, and probably is incalculable. At these
two principal national epochs control of the water was the most
determinative factor. In the future, upon the Navy will depend the
successful maintenance of the two leading national policies mentioned;
the two most essential to the part this country is to play in the
progress of the world.

For, while numerically great in population, the United States is
not so in proportion to territory; nor, though we