THE NAVY AND THE COLONIES
By THE RIGHT HON. SIR JOHN COLOMB, K.C.M.G., M.P.
If statistics of wars are to be trusted, the century which closes on October 21, 1905, has the worst record. While it is undeniable that aversion to war is more prominent as an international sentiment in 1905 than in 1805, yet it was the later part, and not the earlier portion of the century, which earned for those hundred years a dismal and bloody distinction. The last half has been most remarkable for the magnitude of the operations by which the more highly civilized nations have inflicted upon each other, chiefly by land, misery and loss. While every continent has been a theatre of carnage since the great Peace Exhibition of 1851, it is the American which furnishes the most conspicuous proof that common faith, language, and history provide no certain guarantee of peace, even between two sections of the same people, when excited by antagonistic claims of self-interest. It may be that the prominence of aversion to war as an international sentiment is due, not to any higher standard of national ethics, but to the proportions to which operations of war have grown, and their cost increased, by science applied to methods of destruction. In any case, however, the history of the last fifty years shows that organized and perfectly adapted physical force, and not pious beliefs, makes and unmakes Empires and States.
There is, however, a brighter light in the picture the history of the century presents, for when we turn to the sea aspects of the retrospect, we find a singular absence of great maritime wars, which so constantly recurred
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