up China, and generally to consign into untimely graves the various valetudinarians of the Far East. This was a flashlight upon the foreign destiny of England.
But there was something else of moment which this instrument accomplished. Its enactment cut away, once and for the future, the logical basis upon which our policy had stood hitherto. Obviously, if to England isolation was henceforth "an old-fashioned superstition," she would not stop at an alliance with a remote island in the depth of a distant sea.
In view of European feeling, there was no time for us to lose, and no time was lost. With the spring of 1903 the new international epoch of comprehensive and forward action dawned clearly for the English people. But the results are not yet.
This new departure is, for the most part, the active participation of England in Europe for a definite end. That end is, primarily, nothing more grandiose or occult than security, in view of the changing aspect of continental affairs. Our security, however, is to be safeguarded henceforth on a five-fold line. First, a definite side is to be taken in the balance of Europe; secondly, foreign nations, whether in our scale of the balance or not, are to be conciliated by a novel method of comprehensive settlement, embracing all outstanding questions likely to cause hostility; thirdly, a military and naval reorganisation is to be executed with a view to the possibility of
