-THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN DANGER.
This simple fact was pregnant with consequences for world politics and the relations between States. From the start, high British circles had followed with anxious atten tion the advance of mazut as a fuel for big ships. Every body knows that British naval supremacy is the essential condition of the existence of the British Empire. Now, she owes this not only to the number and tonnage of her ships, but still more to her control of fuel. Thanks to the in numerable coaling stations which she has established and which she supplies upon all the world's trade routes, neither warship nor merchantman can cross the ocean without her permission. Furthermore, coal assures to all her ships, great and small, an outward freight certain of sale in any country. Thus they always set sail fully laden, which enables them to give lower homeward freights than any other nation. As a result, all merchandise consigned to Britain costs less for transport than if consigned to any other country ; and British industries enjoy the equivalent of a rebate upon all raw materials bought abroad. This is a weighty advantage over all competitors in the struggle for international markets. It might be said that the whole commercial and industrial prosperity of Britain has rested for a century upon this mastery of coal.
But from the moment when it became possible to use oil fuel for ships, everything was changed. Britain does not produce oil. The United States provide about 8o per cent. of the world's consumption. Were they, then, going to take upon themselves the part of compulsory purveyor to all the fleets of the world ? By a slice of luck, they had no merchant marine. In capable of utilising their precious fuel oil upon the sea, they could only supply British liners. The big British companies—the Cunard, the White Star, and so on—made great haste to convert the boilers of their huge mail steamers to the new fuel.
Then came the War. In the face of the formidable rise in freights, the enormous demand for maritime trans port, and the fearful losses caused by German submarines, American engineers set up immense shipbuilding yards on the two oceans, and, with the energetic encouragement of their Government, in three years built a merchant fleet whose tonnage almost equals, and next year will surpass, that of the British. Then, in possession of the ships and
in control of the fuel, may not America be tempted to wrest from Great Britain the world's carrying trade which she has monopolised so long ? If only she bethought herself of establishing oil depots in the principal ports—and the Standard Oil Company has already announced its plans for this—all the world's shipping, and the proud British steamers themselves, at whatever point they touched land, would be obliged to beg the permission of American oil merchants to continue their voyage.
The military power of the great Empire is thus com promised. The American Congress has recently voted a formidable shipbuilding program. All its super-dread noughts of the Nevada and Oklahoma type are oil-burning. And already it is stated that, thanks to the saving in weight and tonnage due to oil fuel, the power of their guns and the extent of their radius of action enable them to shell and pursue the most terrible mastodons of the British fleet without risk of attack upon themselves. The military security and the commercial supremacy of the United Kingdom are threatened at one and the same time.
Strange indeed are the irony of fate and the frailty of empires ! For six years Britain waged an exhausting war, with the main object of ruining German shipping for ever. At the cost of enormous sacrifices, which will weigh upon her for half a century, she gained her end. The Kaiser's magnificent battleships now lie at the bottom of Scapa Flow, and the fine steamers of the Hamburg-America Line and the North German Lloyd have been shared as booty among the victors. The only maritime rival she had to fear is humbled to the dust. Yet now, from the very war which destroyed that competitor, a new one has arisen, twice as formidable as the old, for, in addition to a supe riority in tonnage, it enjoys the practical monopoly of a fuel of which Britain has none. The burning of American oil in the boiler-rooms of the great liners may be the downfall of the British Empire !