December 26, 1918 
LAND 6i? WATER 
contains great deposits of minerals and oils, while its agri- 
cultural land is extensive and fertile. To-day the country 
is in ruins ; it has experienced the weight of several centuries' 
domination of the Turks, and the boast of Attila is equally 
true of the Ottoman, that "Where my horse has once trod 
the grass ceases to grow." 
We need only visit those lands of European Turkey which 
have shaken off this devastating rule — Greece, Serbia, 
Bulgaria, and Rumania — to see the magic change wrought 
by political and economic independence. All these countries, 
under Ottoman domination, were httle more than heaps of 
human and industrial debris. Their people went in rags, 
scrambling constantly for a few scraps of food ; their roads 
were quagmires ; their villages and cities little more than 
collections of hovels ; they had practically no schools, no 
hospitals, no sanitation, almost none of tlie decencies, to 
say nothing of the graces, of existence. What was the use 
'of cultivating the fields when the rapacious Turkish tax- 
gatherer took practically all tlie harvest to support a lazy 
brood of officials ? The extinguishment of Turkish rule in 
these countries has been hke the hfting of the plague. Almost 
overnight roads have been buUt, school houses and universities 
have been erected, farms have been cultivated, more industries 
have been started, cities with asphalted streets, electric lights, 
telephones, sewers, fine public buildings, residences, and hotels 
have risen on the sites of the old ramshackle capitals. Travel- x 
lers constantly note the different appearance of Russian 
Armenia and Turkish Armenia— one a country in which 
Armenians have had a chance to devdop themselves, the 
other a country in which their position has been worse than 
that of slaves. What freedom has done for all these former 
subjects of the Sultan it will also do for those who are' still 
the victims of his tyranny. And in all this let us not fight 
the Turkish peasant himself. Though he does not possess 
the native industry and ability of his neighbours, yet he, 
too, should have a chance to develop into a man, and 
whatever an enhghtened civihsation can do for him should 
be done. 
The Freedom of the Seas : By Cyril Cox 
THE American newspapers have recently taken up 
the discussion of the meaning of that enigmatic 
phrase, "the freedom of the seas," and have 
expressed their divergent \'iews with such 
cha' acteristic frankness that we are likely to 
hear a good deal on the subject before the peace negotia- 
tions are finally settled. It may be of some service to the 
disputants to know that the phrase, or its equivalent, is more 
than a hundred years old, and that it is to be found in the 
Memoirs of the United Irishman, Wolfe Tone, whose career 
in many of its essential features was reproduced by Roger 
Casement. 
Tone was born at DubUn in 1763, and at the age of 28 
founded the United Irish Society — the forerunner of the Sinn 
Feiners. Soon after the commencement of the war he went 
to America, and thence found his way to France, where he 
spent his time in organising an expedition to invade Ireland, 
and to assist the rebels there in freeing the country from the 
British yoke. After two futile attempts had been made to 
transport an armed force to Ireland, Admiral Bompard in 
1798 reached as far as Lough Swilly, where he encountered 
a British squadron, with disastrous consequences to his own 
squadron. The ship in which Tone was struck her colours 
after a four hours' fight, and Tone himself was captured, 
sent to London, tried for high treason, and sentenced to be 
hanged. While awaiting execution he made an end of him- 
self by cutting his throat with a penknife. 
U Wolfe Tone's Memoirs contain one very instructive passage, 
which shows that the dialogue of the war in those days was 
curiously similar to the dialogue of our own Great War. 
In October 1796, when he was in Paris, he wrote, "The 
Director\' seems fully bent on humbhng the pride of England, 
and lays down as a principle that the peace to which they 
will consent must be one which will ravish from her her 
maritime preponderance, and restore the hberty of the ocean. " 
The hberty of the ocean — the freedom of the seas ! There 
is a frankness about Wolfe Tone's mode of expression which 
compares favourably with German pronouncements. 
It is sufficiently clear that the "freedom of the seas" means 
the same thing as the "liberty of the ocean" meant a hundred 
and twenty years ago — the ravisliing from England of her 
maritime preponderance, Wolfe Tone expressed it clearly 
and concisely. In his day there was no unrestricted sub- 
marine warfare, but Napoleon had other means of retaliating 
against the blockade by wliich the English Navy surrounded 
him, and it is a remarkable fact that his corsairs were on the 
whole more successful than the Kaiser's submarines in harass- 
ing our overseas commerce. This is a fact which is not 
sufficiently appreciated — that without the aid of these modem 
devices, the submarine and the torpedo, and without the 
barbarism inherent in sinking merchant vessels at sight, 
regardless of the sacrifice of human life, the French corsairs, 
by means of sheer skill, inflicted even heavier losses than 
German submarines have inflicted on our mercantile marine. 
The worst year for us was 1797 when they captured 979 of 
our merchant ships, being at a rate of 18 a week. During 
the next ihree years the figures were respectively 688, 730, 
and 666, being at a rate of about 14 a week. The three 
following years show a substantial reduction, which was pro- 
bably due to the development of the convoy system, but, 
curiously enough, the figures go up again after the battlo of 
Trafalgar, showing that however great may be the superiority 
of a nation's naval forces, those forces cannot prevent the 
enemy from making depredations against merchant shipping. 
It is a curious fact that during the Napoleonic wars our food 
shortage in England was not caused by any lack of tonnage 
to convey imports. At first sight it is not easy to reconcile 
this statement with the record of the corsairs' activities. 
The explanation is two-fold. Firstly it has to be remembered 
that more than fifty per cent, of our merchant tonnage was 
diverted during the recent war to naval and military pur- 
poses. Nothing hke this diversion occurred in Napoleonic 
times for the simple reason that we were not sending expedi- 
tionary forces all over the world, and consequently were not 
employing our merchant ships as transports to convey troops 
and munirions to any appreciable extent. In fact, it was . 
not until the Peninsular Campaign, which started some four- 
teen years after the commencement of the war, that we sent 
any considerable force abroad. Up to that time the war 
on our side was almost entirely a naval war. It was bound 
to be so while our supremacy on the sea was still challenged 
by the enemy, and until the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar 
had sufficiently estabUshed that supremacy to afford reason- 
able security to the transports of an expeditionary force. 
In the recent war we started at the point at which our fore- 
fathers had arrived after the battle of Trafalgar, and 
consequently we were able to send troops across the sea 
within the first few weeks. 
The second explanation of the comparative abundance of 
shipping during the Napoleonic Wars is to be found in the 
splendid patriotism of our shipbuilders in those days. 
They knew that the life-blood of England is her overseas 
commerce, that without it England could not live for more 
than a few days, and they made up their minds that, in this 
great struggle for existence, it should never be said that 
England failed through want of effort on their part. 
In those days, as Sir Henry Newbolt says, "England was 
England, and a mighty brood she bore," and scanning the 
pages of the history of those twenty-two years, we cannot 
help being lost in wonder at what our ancestors endured. 
Time and again England's allies were forced to throw down 
their arms, and to leave the island kingdom to carry on the 
struggle alone ; time and again Napoleon with a mighty 
sweep crushed all his adversaries into submission, and held 
all Europe beneath his sway — all except the "nation of 
shopkeepers. " England still fought on with dogged deter- ' 
mination. More than once a bad harvest brought her to 
the verge of starvation ; food was dear at all times ; wages 
were low ; taxes were heavy on the rich and poor ahke, for 
there was not only the income tax on all the incomes over 
£60, but also there were import duties on all the luxuries 
and many of the necessaries of life ; riots and incendiarism 
were constant in every part of the country. And in the midst 
of it all came another cruel blow — the Congress of America 
declared war on Great Britain. 
This was England's darkest hour, and probably no other 
nation in the whole course of the world's history has ever 
faced such darkness, and won her way to light. Certain 
it is that no crisis which has befallen England during the 
War of 1914 to 1918 has ever been so devoid of hope as that 
through which our grandfathers emerged, and by their courage 
and endurance saved for us our heritage. 
