Europe from the ancient land lines which make Constantinople a potential gate to India. We in are West who are accustomed to lives of peace, sometimes forget that war is usually a business of attacking and defending the sources and the routes of trade, and that imperialism concerns itself with the security of the trade sources and the trade routes. If we did not live in a world of enemies, matters might be quite different, for from any standpoint of abstract economics, where trade is able to flow both by land and sea, it is usually desirable that it should. The sea lines are only the slow freight lines and the land lines the fast mail and passenger lines. But to the imperialist, the first requisite of any important trade route is its security against attack by any possible enemy, and where native Governments are kept in a tied condition, it is the imperialists who mark out the long distance trade routes. The British Navy made the sea lines secure but, short of becoming a land Power as well as a sea Power, no means existed by which the British could control any land line from Constantinople toward India, to say nothing of rendering it secure against attack by any possible enemy. Accordingly, Great Britain spared no effort at Constantinople to confine western Europe's communication with India to the sea lines which converge into the Suez Canal, although incidentally the Ottoman Empire was thus long denied the through railway it sorely needed and western Europe was permitted to content itself with slow freight facilities to India.
But with the passing of British influence from Constantinople, the land lines toward India were at
