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GIBRALTAR 97
At the bottom of his heart, John Bull probably
knows there is nothing serious in his pathetic figure of
a lion guarding Europe from savage hordes; he knows
very well that civilization actually is simply the com-
mercial spirit, and that this spirit of commerce has
very excellent means of disposing of all the wild hordes
south and east. For, though the proverb may tell us
that it takes three Jews to fool a Greek and three
Greeks to fool an Armenian, the entire destiny of
Armenia is encompassed in the pocket of a single
Anglo-Teuton gentleman.
The Englishman means to retain for himself the
leadership of this exalted civilization; and for the pur-
pose he needs this rock. He has figured the thing out
something like this: in case of a crisis, the navies of
the powers allied against him will cast their anchors in
the Bay of Gibraltar to bombard this bare rock and
be sunk by its two thousand cannons, leaving his
hands free to act in all the rest of the world. It is
to be hoped that his opponents will have sense enough
to carry out their part of this arrangement. One
Englishman, with whom I discussed this matter seri-
ously, did admit that the rock would be of much
greater practical value if it were Po esha and could be
used as a sort of flying battery.
But the Englishman defends this rock, in spite of
the obvious foolishness of doing so; sometimes he even
defends it with great warmth, as one always defends
an object in the purchase of which one has been stung.
The rock as it stands has cost England far more than
three hundred million dollars, and it costs more mil-
lions annually to maintain it. Even so, there are
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