The long-standing
freedom of the seas vanishes at the German touch. So beyond the present
war there opens the agreeable prospect of a mercantile struggle, a
bitter freight war and a war of Navigation Acts for the ultimate control
in the interests of Germany or of the Anti-German allies, of the world's
trade.
Now how in any of these three cases can the bargaining and trickery of
diplomatists and the advantage-hunting of the belligerents produce any
stable and generally beneficial solution? What all the neutrals want,
what every rational and far-sighted man in the belligerent countries
wants, what the common sense of the whole world demands, is neither the
"ascendancy" of Germany nor the "ascendancy" of Great Britain nor the
"ascendancy" of any state or people or interest in the shipping of the
world. The plain right thing is a world shipping control, as impartial
as the Postal Union. What right and reason and the welfare of coming
generations demand in Poland is a unified and autonomous Poland,
with Cracow, Danzig, and Posen brought into the same Polish-speaking
ring-fence with Warsaw. What everyone who has looked into the Albanian
question desires is that the Albanians shall pasture their flocks and
market their sheepskins in peace, free of Serbian control. In every
country at present at war, the desire of the majority of people is for
a non-contentious solution that will neither crystallise a triumph nor
propitiate an enemy, but which will embody the economic and ethnological
and geographical common sense of the matter.
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