Page:Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919).djvu/236

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
224
DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY

commissioning some one Power as trustee for humanity—a different Power, of course, in the case of different positions. That was the method experimentally tried when Austria-Hungary was entrusted with the administra-tion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the Congress of Berlin, and it succeeded so far as the material advancement of the protected provinces was concerned. There is no reason why the new principle and the facts of the Going Concern should not be reconciled in the cases of Panama, Gibraltar, Malta, Suez, Aden, and Singapore by regarding the American Republic and the British Empire as World Trustees for the peace of the Ocean and of the straits connecting the basins of the Ocean. This, however, would amount merely to a regularisation of existing facts. The test of the principle, as of most other World principles, is in connection with the Heartland and Arabia. The Islanders of the world cannot be indifferent to the fate either of Copenhagen or of Constantinople, or yet of the Kiel Canal, for a great Power in the Heartland and East Europe could prepare, within the Baltic and Black Seas, for War on the Ocean. During the present War it has taken the whole naval strength of the Allies to hold the North Sea and the Eastern Medi-