It was directed to other fields, chiefly those of commerce.

In order to keep it from those fields England fanned the dying fires of French resentment and strove by every agency to kindle a natural sentiment into an active passion.
The historian of the future will record that whatever the immediate fate of Germany may be, the permanent victim was France.
The day England won her to an active policy of vengeance against the victor of 1870, she wooed her to abiding loss.

Her true place in Europe was one of friendship with Germany.

But that meant, inevitably, the discovery by Europe that the chief barrier to European concord lay not in the armies of the powers, but in the ring of hostile battleships that constrained her peoples into armed camps.
European militarism rests on English navalism.

English navalism requires for its continued existence a disunited Europe; and a Europe kept apart is a Europe armed, anxious and watchful, bent on mutual attack, its eyes fixed on the _earth_.