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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: by persuading the ruler of the sea? Or, suppose the wealth of some
state or other to consist of iron, or may be of bronze,[13] or of
linen yarn, where will it find a market except by permission of the
supreme maritime power? Yet these are the very things, you see, which
I need for my ships. Timber I must have from one, and from another
iron, from a third bronze, from a fourth linen yarn, from a fifth wax,
etc. Besides which they will not suffer their antagonists in those
parts[14] to carry these products elsewhither, or they will cease to
use the sea. Accordingly I, without one stroke of labour, extract from
the land and possess all these good things, thanks to my supremacy on
the sea; whilst not a single other state possesses the two of them.
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