6. Is England Played Out? - Page 2

centre of the nascent world,
and bound together Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece,
Sicily, and Italy in one mercantile system. A little later, Hellas
itself enlarged, so as to include Syracuse, Byzantium, Alexandria,
Cyrene, Cumae, Neapolis, Massilia. The inland sea became "a Greek lake."
But as navigation thus slowly widened to the western Mediterranean
basin, the centre of commerce had to shift perforce from Hellas to the
mid-point of the new area. Two powerful trading towns occupied such a
mid-point in the Mediterranean--Rome and Carthage; and they were driven
to fight out the supremacy of the world (the world as it then existed)
between them. With the Roman Empire, the circle extended so as to take
in the Atlantic coasts, Gaul, Spain, and Britain, which then, however,
lay not at the centre but on the circumference of civilisation. During
the Middle Ages, when navigation began to embrace the great open sea as
well as the Mediterranean, a double centre sprang up: the Italian
Republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, were still the chief carriers;
but the towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent, and Antwerp began to compete
with them, and the Atlantic states, France, England, the Low Countries,
rose into importance. By and by, as time goes on, the discoveries of
Columbus and of Vasco di Gama open out new tracks. Suddenly commerce is
revolutionised. France, England, Spain, become nearer to America and
India than Italy; so Italy declines; while the Atlantic states usurp the
first place as the centres of civilisation.

Our own age brings fresh seas into the circle once more. It is no longer
the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean that alone count;
the Pacific also begins to be considered. China, Japan, the Cape; Chili,
Peru, the Argentine; California, British Columbia, Australia, New
Zealand; all of them are parts of the system of to-day; civilisation is
world-wide.

Has this change of area altered the central position of England? Not at
all, save to strengthen it. If you look at the hemisphere of greatest
land, you will see that England occupies its exact middle. Insular
herself, and therefore all made up of ports, she is nearer all ports in
the world than any other country is or ever can be. I don't say that
this insures for her perpetual dominion, such as Virgil prophesied for
the Roman Empire; but I do say it makes her a hard country to beat in
commercial competition. It accounts for Liverpool, London, Glasgow,
Newcastle; it even accounts in a way for Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds,
and Sheffield. England now stands at the mathematical centre of the
practical world, and unless some Big Thing occurs to displace her, she
must continue to stand there. It takes a great deal to