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A new phrase is subtly creeping into discussions of all international relations.

It was first coined by the military and naval observers of all the Governments sent abroad to study the strategy of the Great War. Then it found its way into the secret official report of the great practical scientists of each nation involved in the War, employed to devise new inventions to counteract submarine and mine and aeroplane.

The phrase is "Land Power."

Note it well!

It is destined to become in the next fifty years the same pivotal focus of national defence that the phrase "Sea Power" implied for the past four-hundred years; and there is not a big fuel or engineering scientist, naval or military man, who observed the past War, who does not realize this.

It is the real reason why so many Americans smile contemptuously at the League of Nations as the fatuous myth of impracticable dreamers, who do not know facts and refuse to recognize them, even when they impinge with irresistible impact against a stubborn determination of the whole League or no League.

Land Power is the pivot of that Greater Britain which King George foresaw when he visited Canada a few years ago, and which the Prince of Wales again foresaw when he recently crossed the Canadian prairies. Both princes had their training in the navy; and the British navy was the first to realize what was happening, though the American navy was a close second; and their realization is likely to leak out in the American Naval Enquiry, like secrets whispered by boys suddenly out of school. It will be recalled that a party has recently arisen in England protesting against the construction of any more $20 and $40 million dreadnoughts. This is not a pacifist movement. It originated among the younger and more progressive element inside the British Navy. Practically, a similar factor has become active in the same class of the American Navy. This was apparent when Secretary Daniels of the Navy heard evidence from the Aeroplane and Submarine specialists as to the powerlessness of a $40 million superdreadnought above a submarine equipped with latest devices, or under a seaplane equipped with similar devices. The controversy has literally split the naval authorities of both countries into two hostile camps. The old men stand for more and more powerful superdreadnoughts; and they loathe service in the assassin shark of the underseas—the submarine; but the newer, younger and more progressive element point out, that it is not a matter of likes and dislikes but of scientific tests; and that the $40 million superdreadnought is only a helpless Goliath vulnerable to the David's pebble of a bomb from aeroplane or submarine. Therefore, the only safety of a nation is in an impassable fence of aeroplanes and submarines. Tradition dies hard. The controversy is likely to assume the proportions of a battle royal between Goliaths and Davids in the next ten years.

No, I am not referring to Canada as "the Granary of the Empire," the way we used to talk in the old hard times of the North-West, when we were trying to bolster up our own depression with hope deferred.

It is a deeper and subtler thing than that.

It is a new line-up for the nations of the world, which Russia and Germany foresee and are forefending by preparing to get together.

It is a new line-up, which makes Canada, not a pivot, but the pivot of the British Empire.

British statesmen see it. That is why the newer men are eager and willing for Canada to have her own embassy, or legation, or whatnot in Washington.

It will bring more British capital into Canada in the next twenty years than was invested in the United States in a century; and if you know the facts of the case, it was British capital that financed more than fifty per cent. of the opening of the American West.

It will bring more capital into Canada in the next twenty years than all the two billions of American capital poured into Canada in the last ten years.

During the War, the Navy did not tell secrets, but most of us know that wonderful scientific devices were perfected for listening in on wireless messages, for directing the spiral course of an underseas bomb, for detecting the approach of a submarine or surface ship for a radius of four to eight miles, for camouflaging blockade runners, so that in one trial case a blockade runner actually defied hitting by all the big coast guns and war vessels guarding the coast firing at her for a radius of four miles for four hours.

Germany knows this. When she sank her fleet she knew that she suffered little loss and put the Allies to great expense.

Russia knows this and will work out a union with Germany, unless the Allies beat Germany to it in an alliance with Russia; for what most of us do not take in is that all these scientific devices cut both ways.

If we may listen in on wireless messages, so may the enemy.

If an underseas bomb can be directed unerringly on a spiral course, the submarine is ten times a more dangerous shark to Sea Power than ever before; and if scientific camouflage can defy hitting by all the warships in the world in a radius of four miles for four hours, the same camouflage renders the submarine invulnerable. The nation that is best equipped and with the greatest number of submarines is safe from attack and invulnerable in naval war.

Naval men do not like that word invulnerable. They dislike it for two reasons. If the submarine is invulnerable it means the end of costly navies. It means the end of big appropriations for navies, which in the past have always worked out in countless ramifications of ship yards and steel and political support. It spells the doom of Sea Power except in terms of land defence. The old line men resent that, though the new blood and the scientists know it has been proved by the War. Also all navy men hate, loathe and despise submarine work. It is murderous. It is unethical. It is the deed of a hidden assassin, violating all codes of sea or land. Then, physically, it is plain hell, destructive of morale, and discipline, and nerves, and mental balance. No crew will stand it for a long term and no commander can command it for a long term. Germany could maintain her submarine warfare only by the wildest exaggeration of honours in reward and the widest latitude as to discipline and stimulants when ashore. Navy men hate the submarine; but there it is—a Frankenstein thing of evil, a menace sounding the doom of the very thing it was created to defend—Sea Power.

Old line navy men are setting their faces against the inevitable. New blood, guided by scientific facts, is facing and forefending against the inevitable.

"Do you realize," I was asked by a scientist, who did more with new inventions in bombs and hydrophones and fuel devices for the Allied navies than any man living; "do you realize Admiral Mahan's Sea Power will have to be re-written? It will have to be re-written Land Power; and all the nations who don't want to be wiped out, will have to line up with the new order.

"People thoughtlessly criticize England for a quick conciliatory peace with Russia, the Russia of the Soviets, when she is ready to thrash the Turks at the drop of the hat; but do they stop to think? If England does not gain Russian friendship, Germany will." (This man's most brilliant son—an inventor like himself—was killed by a German submarine.) "If Russia and Germany lock power and provide themselves with sufficient submarines, of which they have the scientific secrets as well as we, they can defy the world. Supremacy becomes not Sea Power but Land Power—Land Power reinforced by sufficient submarines to guard the coast and harry commerce at sea. Then where is England? Where is the United States? Naval supremacy becomes a question of land defence; and England's boasted trade, which is her life blood, and our foreign trade, without which half our factories would have to shut down on a moment's notice as they did when the war broke out in 1914, would be closed up, hermetically sealed.

"That is why I say the change from Sea Power to Land Power makes Canada the pivot of the Empire to-day.

"That is why you will see British capital pour into Canada, not to escape war taxes, but because Canada must become the base of British supplies, the link between the United States and Great Britain for material defence against an Orient which is plotting to become hostile, or a Russian-German alliance which is now overtly hostile. With Canada, the United States and Great Britain hostile"—he threw up his hands—"the avalanche isn't coming—it is here if we permit that. Strangle British trade and you strangle the Empire! Drive a wedge between England and the United States; and you throw the gift of the gods and the sacrifices of the heroes into the lap of the enemy! It is so plain, I gasp, that our penny politicians don't see it. If we permit that to happen, it is a continent against a continent, America against Europe, and Europe against Asia—Asia menacing our West Coast—and what is to hinder except our defence of land-base submarines? And how many submarines do you think we have—facts, you know, not hot-air self-gratulations?

"Let me tell you some inside facts that seem to have no connection, but are vital as death and taxes; and remember I was an adviser to the navy when all this was going on. I was on the ships trying out devices again and again.

"We have boasted how we got the German submarines. Did we? We had submarine chasers in the hundreds. We—I am speaking of the U.S. Navy—had private yachts transformed into coastguards and scouts by the thousands. We literally seeded certain sections of the North Sea with mines. Do you know how many German 'subs' we actually got? The chasers got exactly five. The scouts and guards say they got four—nine in all. Well, by actual count, seven German 'subs' are the tally of the American navy; and the mines got"—he paused—"by actual count not one. That is why the navy men, who care more for their country than for vain-glory and medals, are determined to blow the lid off secrecy, let the truth out and force a re-organization along scientific lines. The mistake Germany made was in beginning the war before she had enough submarines to defy the world. Her boastfulness overvaunted as usual and fell short. If she had had enough submarines to cripple the Allies' navies as she almost crippled the merchantmen at one stage of the war——" He paused. What I inferred from his silence was that the United States would have fought its Somme and Chateau-Thierry up in Canada repelling the German invasion which the Kaiser had definitely planned for Canada.

"Here is the trouble," he said. "You think our hydrophones and detectors protect our big dreadnoughts; but it works just the other way. As long as the ship is above water, the detector can find a target within a hair's breadth, can hear every footfall above decks, can register every lift of a man's hand, or turn of his head if he is up in the crow's nest on the look-out. But you equip the submarine with the same apparatus; where does your big dreadnought get off? It gets off the earth and the sea, straight to bottom quicker than I can utter these words; for get this point clear—as soon as the submarine submerges and zig-zags, the waves of the sea deflect the detector. We know she is sharking under somewhere in a radius of four miles; but the waves deflect the register and we can't tell within four miles where she is.

"But she knows where we are to a hair's breadth; and your $20 million ship with 5,000 troops aboard may be junk in twenty seconds in the bottomless sea.

"These are scientific facts learned bitterly and at great cost in this war; and we can't evade them.

"They change Sea Power to Land Power, and it is for Land Power we must all fortify ourselves.

"That's where Canada comes in as the pivot of the British Empire.

"Let me tell you of a trial we gave one of our biggest and fastest ships. She made her test the fastest a big ship has ever gone—how fast is a naval secret; and we loaded her with men to the limit to go across. Her hydrophone registered a 'sub.' She made two to three miles faster getting away from that submarine in the dark than she made on her trial spin. If the 'sub' had had speed and a hydrophone to locate her——" He didn't finish the sentence.

"Then how about the big Navy Bills?" I asked.

He laughed. "Ask the scientists," he answered. "Just-one-big-bluff-to-the-taxpayers. Whereas what we really want for safety is a treaty with England and Canada. That leaves all three nations invulnerable."

I didn't follow, and looked it.

"Do you realize the catastrophe that has happened to the world in Mexico's oil wells?" he asked.

"You mean shutting down drilling for three months?"

"No—no—a much graver thing. You know how two of the biggest oil wells—the gushers—one an American, the other British—have taken salt water. Now when our Shipping Board called for tenders for twenty-nine million barrels of oil, it got tenders for only one-million-and-a-half. We are short of oil in this country fifty million barrels more than we can produce. The navies of the Allies to-day are oil burners. So are the merchant ships. Six-hour days and five-day weeks and high wages and scarce labor have made coal an impossible sea fuel; but we are all depending on Mexico. We thought her oil supply inexhaustible. We thought her supply of 100,000 barrels, 200,000 barrels, 300,000 barrels a day, a world supply for Sea Power. But what has happened?

"Mexican oil fields have always been an enigma to scientists. In other fields, you pumped from sand, which acted as a storage or reservoir under earth pressure; but what happened in Mexico? You could never study the field geologically as you did other fields; for the heavy tropical rains covered the earth with an impenetrable mat of verdure and humus. We didn't guess there were not storage sands below till the salt water came frothing and feathering up under hydrostatic pressure; and then we knew. These were not oil-stored, or oil-saturated, sands, but deep bowls, or pools, of oil resting under terrific pressure on salt water. When you got to salt water, the terrific pressure blew up and the oil was gone in every well for four square miles, where in other areas the sands were acting as storage for years, in Pennsylvania for as long as fifty years. Other wells will be drilled there and other big gushers will be found; but we have to face the fact—an inexhaustible supply does not exist there, or in any similar formation of the tropics. We are short of fuel now for our merchant ships and navy. We are short for our tractors and motors. Oil is to-day twice as high in price as it was in 1914, and in four more years may be twice as high as it is to-day. Gasoline costs in England 83 cents a gallon."

I still did not see where Canada came in as the pivot of the British Empire in a new era of Land Power.

"Here is where Canada comes in.

"Here is where the United States must look to a Great Britain north of our boundary for our future mutual safety and prosperity and defence.

"First—Canada has possibly the greatest undeveloped areas of gas and asphaltum and crude oils in the North of any unexploited areas. Don't mistake me! I know two of the strongest companies in the world are already on the field drilling; but the point is—no private capital can test her unexploited areas in the way our mid-continental field has been tried, or in the way Cowdray and Doheny have tested Mexico. The oil for which the world is in need is there. It must be found, as one of Canada's greatest assets. Where gas burns perpetually, as on the MacKenzie River since 1792, are indubitable signs of oil or asphaltum beds of possible oil fuel; and those signs must be explored till found, no matter what the cost. The Empire must have that fuel for future inviolate, invulnerable Land Power.

"Canada's next great fuel asset is in her Western soft coals, of which she has been trying to make briquettes. Her lignites by a new chemical process, which we didn't purpose giving out during the war, but shall now, can be converted into a new oil that will give her Empire the future whip hand of the world. Canada is asleep as to this. We are not. I predict—" but he didn't finish his prediction. He finished:

"Canada has the pivotal position for the new era of Land Power."

I do not give this man's name, for he has said some things about the old line navy, which the old line men would not like; and his processes are to-day in use in every great navy of the world. He was consulting engineer for the Russian Government before the War. He was consulted by Germany years before the War; and he was the constant adviser of the Allied navies during the War. He has personally visited every oil field in China, in the Balkans, in Mexico, in South America, in Russia, in the East Indies. He is one of the greatest fuel experts living; and he says "Canada is asleep as to this."

Then he went on to talk of Canada as the potential food base for the Empire as well as for the United States, but came back always to the thing we all learned in the War—that food without merchant fleets to convey it is useless; and Land Power means submarine defence and both merchant fleets and submarine defence work back to fuel supply, of which Canada has as rich resources as her wheat fields.

Was this why, I wonder, the Prince of Wales years ago, and the young Prince this year, both schooled in Sea Power, referred to Canada as the Greater Britain Overseas?

Now let us consider what the submarine may become within ten years. I quote from an interview given the New York Herald by Professor Flamm, one of Germany's greatest experts on submarine warfare:

"It is anticipated by German naval experts that Professor Flamm's discovery will lead to the building of submersible armoured warships of 10,000 tons, with gun turrets on deck, torpedo tubes and having a speed of twenty-five nautical miles an hour, with a cruising radius of 12,000 miles. Should these expectations be realized, naval warfare would be revolutionized and the building of capital ships—superdreadnoughts and battle cruisers—probably would be discontinued.

"An important English ship-building company has already taken out English patents on Professor Flamm's discovery and it has also been patented in both Holland and Italy.

"Professor Flamm has finished detailed designs for a submarine of 1,443 tons, armoured. Also he has partially worked out plans for the construction of a submarine of 4,870 tons and 121 meters long, carrying two or four twenty-one centimeter (8 inch) guns, with a speed of twenty-five nautical miles an hour. He hoped, he said, to build a boat of 8,400 tons and one of 9,900 tons with a speed of twenty-eight nautical miles, armoured with plate sixty to seventy millimeters (two and one-half inches) thick and carrying four guns of twenty-one or twenty-two centimeters."

Or to quote other witnesses: "The programme for the construction of large fighting-vessels has been set aside until a complete survey can be made," reports the New York Herald. "Since this decision the captured German superdreadnought Baden has been sunk by bombs dropt by British naval airmen."

General Mitchell declares that the development in aircraft since the war "spells the doom of the present-day dreadnought"; that the modern battleship "is as helpless as the armoured knight was against firearms." "We can sink any enemy vessel, armoured or unarmoured, that comes within 200 miles of our coast."

Says the New York World: "There is nothing at the back of the General Board's recommendations except the hunger of the General Board for more battleships at a time when the value of battleships is more or less problematical."

General Mitchell's main contention, points out the Boston Herald, is that "a thousand airplanes could be built for the cost of a single dreadnought, and with 3,000 airplanes we could construct an adequate force for the protection of the whole country."

Air forces, it is held by the Air Service officers, move five or six times as fast as the fastest ships of the Navy, and from an altitude of 10,000 feet an aerial observer has a "radius of view of about fifty miles; that is a circle with a diameter of a hundred miles." Therefore, they contend, the future control of the sea depends upon the control of the air, inasmuch as Admiral Fiske's torpedo-plane, according to the New York Tribune, "has been greatly improved and its deadliness against battleships demonstrated."

Sir Percy Scott, the centre of a storm of controversy over the big battleship problem, has had abuse and praise freely showered on his head. He says: "As regards the next naval war, I believe that it will be fought under entirely different conditions from those which obtained during the late war. It is now generally recognized that if the Germans had possessed more submarines at the beginning of the war they would have won "all out." Aggression by sea will be very difficult, if not impossible, and therefore if aggression by sea becomes impossible naval warfare must cease."

Or listen to P. W. Wilson, an English authority on Navy matters in the New York Review of Reviews: "In the next war everything on land would depend on equipment. And equipment means chemistry in its most fearful activities. Britain to-day prefers battle-planes to battleships. She is building the former while she is scrapping the latter. On her air service she is spending 100 million dollars a year.

"The nature of sea-power has changed. Before the war it used to be said that Britain could not be invaded because she had a bigger navy than that of Germany. To-day we see that, owing to the inevitable development of submarines and aircraft, no country at any time will be able to invade any other country across the ocean.

"When the war broke out Germany had only thirty-six submarines. With ten times that number she would have won. Usually there were not more than eight or nine U-boats in use at any one time. But on the average each U-boat sank 100 million dollars' worth of shipping. With 600 destroyers and 6,000 auxiliary craft on the watch day and night for four and a half years the Allies captured or sunk only 205 submarines, and these submarines were of a type as yet rudimentary.

"The submarine is now supplemented by the larger submersibles and by aircraft which can discharge not bombs alone, but torpedoes also. So formidable are these novel engines of sea-war that Britain has not only ceased building any new battleships or battle cruisers, but has actually scrapped three of the latest type which were at various stages of construction. So far as Britain is concerned, therefore, the race in battleships is dropped. Most British admirals consider that the monster battleships now under construction in the United States, at forty million dollars apiece, would never go into battle in any war fought with the new weapons of attack. Britain has also scrapped more than 600 warships and the scrapping merrily goes on. An American battleship a mile long, with a hundred 30-inch guns, would matter less to England than half a dozen submarines, built against her by Norway, at a hundredth the cost."

Suppose the submarine and aeroplane experts are right. Suppose Admiral Mahan's Sea Power must be re-written in terms of Land Power. How will the New World line up?

Germany, Austria and Russia present one group. They can exist by themselves independent of the outside world. If the submarine and the aeroplane had been as fully developed when the War broke out as they are to-day, they could have prevented the landing of a foreign soldier on European soil. This is not the foundationless inference of an outsider. It is the consensus of expert reports given to both the British and the American Navies; and by the British, the report is being accepted.

Germany, Austria, Russia—one group.

Take the Orient. Is Japan asleep? Not perceptibly to the naked eye. Japan is the dominant force in the Orient to-day. She may break her power as Germany did by precipitate plunging before the stage is set; but if she bides her time till she conciliates China and wins India—you have the Oriental group—Japan, progressive as the United States; China, a sleeping giant awakening; India, a seething volcano of inter-racial hates held in check only by British dominance, which may last, or snap, as Mexico snapped when people unready for self-government seized it and plunged in the abyss of anarchy.

Then there is the group of Latin-America. We may flatter ourselves that in another world-war such as Viscount Grey forewarns us would end modern civilization, that Latin-America would line up with the great self-governing democracies of the English-speaking races; but Japan is already a strong factor in the Western Republics of South America and Germany is already the preponderating influence in at least two of the Latin-American Republics on the Atlantic. We can judge what a racial group will do by what they have done; and until it became apparent that Germany was destined to be defeated, the neutrality of the Latin-American Republics was of a quality that played into the hands of the enemy, or leaned so far backwards that we had to pray to be saved from their friendship.

There remains the English-speaking group of democracies—the United States, Canada, Great Britain and her South African and Australasian dependencies. As Lothrop Stoddard has pointed out with a clearness not to be confused, Islam is busy with South Africa. Which race will dominate Africa, no man can foretell. In a submarine and seaplane war, Australasia could be written off the map as quarantined. England would last just as long as she could keep her sea lanes open with supplies of food and raw products coming to her, just as long as she could keep her fence of submarines and aeroplanes intact from invasion.

She knows that now, and is preparing to pour her colonists by the millions into Canada as a Greater Britain Overseas; so you have the final group, the United States, Canada, Great Britain; and again to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the only future for these great democracies is to hang together, or be hanged separately.