Alfred Thayer Mahan

“ And now, arrested on the south by the rights of a race wholly alien to us, and on the north by a body of states of like traditions to our own, whose freedom to choose their own affiliations we respect, we have come to the sea. In our infancy we bordered upon the Atlantic only; our youth carried our boundary to the Gulf of Mexico; to-day maturity sees us upon the Pacific. Have we no right or no call to progress farther in any direction? Are there for us beyond the sea horizon none of those essential interests, of those evident dangers, which impose a policy and confer rights? ”

“ Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of the world as in the political development and material prosperity which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in commerce and in war. ”

“ But, with the strait, time has introduced a factor of which he could not dream,—a great nation midway between the West he knew and the East he sought, spanning the continent he unwittingly found, itself both East and West in one. To such a state, which in itself sums up the two conditions of Columbus's problem; to which the control of the strait is a necessity, if not of existence, at least of its full development and of its national security, who can deny the right to predominate in influence over a region so vital to it? None can deny save its own people ”

“ Beginning with the birth of the century, perfected during its continuance, its close finds them in full maturity and power, with a development in numbers, in reserve force, in organization, and in material for war, over which the economist perpetually wails, whose existence he denounces, and whose abolition he demands. As freedom has grown and strengthened, so have they grown and strengthened. Is this singular product of a century whose gains for political liberty are undeniable, a mere gross perversion of human activities, as is so confidently claimed on many sides? ”

“ Now in a certain sense we all want a navy for defence only. It is to be hoped that the United States will never seek war except for the defence of her rights, her obligations, or her necessary interests. In that sense our policy may always be defensive only, although it may compel us at times to steps justified rather by expediency—the choice of the lesser evil—than by incontrovertible right. But if we have interests beyond sea which a navy may have to protect, it plainly follows that the navy has more to do, even in war, than to defend the coast ”

“ The history of the present century has been that of a constant increasing pressure of our own civilization upon these older ones, till now, as we cast our eyes in any direction, there is everywhere a stirring, a rousing from sleep, drowsy for the most part, but real, unorganized as yet, but conscious that that which rudely interrupts their dream of centuries possesses over them at least two advantages,—power and material prosperity,—the things which unspiritual humanity, the world over, most craves. ”

“ Conversely, as we all know, the rule on land is by no means invariable, and private property receives scant consideration when its appropriation or destruction serves the purposes of an enemy. The man who trudges the highway, cudgel in hand, may claim for his cudgel all the sacredness with which civilization invests property; but if he use it to break his neighbor's head, the respect for his property, as such, quickly disappears. Now, private property borne upon the seas is engaged in promoting, in the most vital manner, the strength and resources of the nation by which it is handled. ”

“ Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Cæsar's, may have erected against them. Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned—forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits. ”

“ The restlessness of Australia and the Cape Colony has doubtless counted for much in British advances in those regions. Contemporary with all these movements, from the first to the last, has been the development of great standing armies, or rather of armed nations, in Europe; and, lastly, the stirring of the East, its entrance into the field of Western interests, not merely as a passive something to be impinged upon, but with a vitality of its own, formless yet, but significant, inasmuch as where before there was torpor, if not death, now there is indisputable movement and life. ”

“ I am not careful, however, to search into the details of a great movement, which indeed may never come, but whose possibility, in existing conditions, looms large upon the horizon of the future, and against which the only barrier will be the warlike spirit of the representatives of civilization. Whate'er betide, Sea Power will play in those days the leading part which it has in all history, and the United States by her geographical position must be one of the frontiers from which, as from a base of operations, the Sea Power of the civilized world will energize. ”

“ Bound and swathed in the traditions of our own eighteenth century, when we were as truly external to the European world as we are now a part of it, we, under the specious plea of peace and plenty—fulness of bread—hug an ideal of isolation, and refuse to recognize the solidarity of interest with which the world of European civilization must not only look forward to, but go out to meet, the future that, whether near or remote, seems to await it. ”

“ Even if we leave out of consideration the invaluable benefit to society, in this age of insubordination and anarchy, that so large a number of youth, at the most impressionable age, receive the lessons of obedience, order, respect for authority and law, by which military training conveys a potent antidote to lawlessness, it still would remain a mistake, plausible but utter, to see in the hoped-for subsidence of the military spirit in the nations of Europe a pledge of surer progress of the world towards universal peace, general material prosperity, and ease. ”

“ With a probability of three months' peace in Europe, no maritime power would fear to support its demands by a number of ships with which it would be loath indeed to part for a year.
Yet, were our sea frontier as strong as it now is weak, passive self-defence, whether in trade or war, would be but a poor policy, so long as this world continues to be one of struggle and vicissitude. All around us now is strife; "the struggle of life," "the race of life," are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation ”

“ If our own civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus press upon us,—in either event we need time, and time can be gained only by organized material force. ”

“ The progress of the world from age to age, in its ever-changing manifestations, is a great political drama, possessing a unity, doubtless, in its general development, but in which, as act follows act, one situation alone can engage, at one time, the attention of the actors. Of this drama war is simply a violent and tumultuous political incident. A navy, therefore, whose primary sphere of action is war, is, in the last analysis and from the least misleading point of view, a political factor of the utmost importance in international affairs, one more often deterrent than irritant. ”

“ Let us not shrink from pitting a broad self-interest against the narrow self-interest to which some would restrict us. The demands of our three great seaboards, the Atlantic, the Gulf, and the Pacific,—each for itself, and all for the strength that comes from drawing closer the ties between them,—are calling for the extension, through the Isthmian Canal, of that broad sea common along which, and along which alone, in all the ages prosperity has moved. ”

“ We may, if we will, shut our eyes to the vast outside masses of aliens to our civilization, now powerless because we still, with a higher material development, retain the masculine combative virtues which are their chief possession; but, even if we disregard them, the ground already shakes beneath our feet with physical menace of destruction from within, against which the only security is in constant readiness to contend. ”

“ For what, after all, is our not unjustly vaunted European and American civilization? An oasis set in the midst of a desert of barbarism, rent with many intestine troubles, and ultimately dependent, not upon its mere elaboration of organization, but upon the power of that organization to express itself in a menacing and efficient attitude of physical force, sufficient to resist the numerically overwhelming, but inadequately organized hosts of outsiders. ”

“ Despite a certain great original superiority conferred by our geographical nearness and immense resources,—due, in other words, to our natural advantages, and not to our intelligent preparations,—the United States is wofully unready, not only in fact but in purpose, to assert in the Caribbean and Central America a weight of influence proportioned to the extent of her interests. We have not the navy, and, what is worse, we are not willing to have the navy, that will weigh seriously in any disputes with those nations whose interests will conflict there with our own. ”

“ But while the maintenance of peace by sagacious prevision is the laurel of the statesman, which, in failing to achieve except by force, he takes from his own brow and gives to the warrior, it is none the less a necessary part of his official competence to recognize that in public disputes, as in private, there is not uncommonly on both sides an element of right, real or really believed, which prevents either party from yielding, and that it is better for men to fight than, for the sake of peace, to refuse to support their convictions of justice. ”

“ Such an attitude of itself demands of us to be ready to support it by organized force, exactly as the mutual jealousy of states within the European Continent imposes upon them the maintenance of their great armies—destined, we believe, in the future, to fulfil a nobler mission. Where we thus exclude others, we accept for ourselves the responsibility for that which is due to the general family of our civilization; and the Caribbean Sea, with its isthmus, is the nexus where will meet the chords binding the East to the West, the Atlantic to the Pacific. ”

“ During the critical centuries when Great Britain was passing through that protracted phase of her history in which, from one of the least among states, she became, through the power of the sea, the very keystone and foundation upon which rested the commercial—for a time even the political—fabric of Europe, the free action of her statesmen and people was clogged by no uneasy sense that the national genius was in conflict with artificial, self-imposed restrictions. ”

“ Proximity, as has been noted, is a fruitful source of political friction, but proximity is the characteristic of the age. The world has grown smaller. Positions formerly distant have become to us of vital importance from their nearness. But, while distances have shortened, they remain for us water distances, and, however short, for political influence they must be traversed in the last resort by a navy, the indispensable instrument by which, when emergencies arise, the nation can project its power beyond its own shore-line. ”

“ For the reasons mentioned it has been an easy but a short-sighted policy, wherever it has been found among statesmen or among journalists, to fasten attention purely on internal and economical questions, and to reject, if not to resent, propositions looking towards the organization and maintenance of military force, or contemplating the extension of our national influence beyond our own borders, on the plea that we have enough to do at home,—forgetful that no nation, as no man, can live to itself or die to itself. ”