210 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



helpless human beings, which we have to shudder at ; 

 but it was reserved for seafarers of a later day and a 

 boasted higher civilization to use the galley-slave in 

 war, and war, too, without any other excuse than that 

 of greed. Yes, the maritime polity of the Tyrians and 

 Sidonians was essentially a peaceful one, and if their 

 religion was one of dark and bloody cruelty, we ought 

 not to forget that they used the sea with a due sense 

 of its proper relation to mankind, as a means of 

 beneficial intercourse between the nations, and not 

 as a truly infernal battle-ground. 



For many generations it would appear that they 

 enjoyed a practical monopoly of our sea-trading, so 

 that it was no figure of speech to say of the Prince of 

 Tyre that the waters made him great. Indeed, we 

 have the best evidence to prove that they were the 

 teachers of the other nations whose territories bordered 

 the great Middle Sea, and, as has so often happened 

 since, long after the Greeks and the Romans had 

 established a navy, it was to the Phoenicians and their 

 descendants, the Carthaginians, that the new-comers 

 had to look for captains, officers, and pilots. But long 

 before the more northern nations had become fully 

 alive to the advantages of sea-traffic for the purposes 

 of commerce, they had with characteristic blood- 

 thirstiness seen what a tremendous power it gave 

 them for the furtherance of their schemes of conquest. 

 And one of the first uses that the Romans, at any rate, 

 made of their sea-power was to destroy the nation that 

 had educated them in the use of it. In doing this 

 they left a lesson for Britain which is like the hand- 

 writing on the wall, but which, alas ! we do not seem 

 able to interpret or even to read, It is that a maritime 



