She never engaged large bodies of men in war; she could take
advantage of every French reverse during the two centuries when the
French were perpetually engaged in huge Continental conflicts.
Great Britain, in a word, by ceaseless vigilance and at a great expense
of energy, managed upon the whole to dominate one branch of the narrow
seas, the channel. Upon the other branch, the North Sea, she felt nearly
always secure. An exception to this security was found during the brief
Dutch period in the seventeenth century and again, much more acutely,
when the French were the masters of the Low Countries, and when Napoleon
took control of the shipbuilding yards not only from Brest to Dunkirk,
but from Dunkirk to the Bight of Heligoland.
This presence of the French power in Holland, Belgium, and Frisia, in
particular the French control of Antwerp, was the true cause of violent
anxiety, and the no less violent efforts in reply which Britain made
during the Napoleonic wars. For twenty-three years she fought, with but
two short intervals of repose, upon a dozen nominal pleas, but with one
plain piece of statesmanship at the back of her mind--that no one should
control the narrow seas against herself.
And especially that if she could not prevent the existence in normal
times of a very powerful, dangerous French fleet, rendering her anxious
for one-half of those seas, at least the other half should be free from
such anxiety.
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