Two routes stand out, it writes: one, which they call the Northwest Passage, along the northern coasts of Alaska and Canada; the other, the Northern Sea Route, which skirts Russia's northern shore. Each promises a shorter voyage. The headline says the thing itself: the passage needs icebreakers and a business case. Who is to build those ships, who is to pay, what those resources are, oil or metals or fish, the paper does not say. I am in the habit of counting forts before I praise, and I would ask these things first.

Consider what has happened. The ice was a wall no one built, no one guarded, no one kept on pay. For centuries it closed the north for nothing, as the Ocean closed Britain. Now that wall opens and shuts with each summer, like a gate whose sentry is awake one hour and asleep the next. When nature draws back a frontier, men must either hold it or lose it. There is no third choice.

I know what a frontier at the edge of the world is. In Britain I did not draw a line on a wax tablet; I walked it. Thus it is written of me: "he was the first to build a wall, eighty miles long, to divide the barbarians from the Romans." But the wall did not stand by stone alone: a fort at every mile, turrets between, a military road behind the rampart, cohorts to winter there, granaries to feed them. A line no one lives on is a mapmaker's fable, not the limes of an empire.

This much I approve in the paper: it demands a business case. Rightly. A fort without its annona is a tomb; a road no ship travels feeds the forest, not trade. Nor have I forgotten what I did myself on taking power: I gave up Trajan's provinces beyond the Euphrates, because they were held by will alone, not by strength. It is written of me that I "devoted myself at once to keeping peace throughout the world." Whoever claims an ice passage and prepares neither ships nor harbors nor supply is occupying my Mesopotamia again, and will be forced to hand it back.

Yet the paper is silent on two things an emperor would ask first. It does not say how many ships now pass by either route; but whoever already holds the route along the Russian shore is not debating, he is sailing. Second, whose waters lie between Alaska and Canada the paper does not settle; and if the allies do not agree, the passage must be fixed in law before it is fixed with ships. I fixed the praetor's edict once and for all so that law should not drift from year to year; let the ice drift, the law must not.

The remedy, then, is ready to hand, and not new. Build iron-armored ships to break the ice; set harbors and supply stations along the coast, as forts along the rampart; settle the law of passage with your ally before strangers settle it for you; and then let the magistrate go and see for himself, not govern from the curia by painted maps. If the republic will not do these things, it is more honorable to admit the route is not its own than to claim it in the newspapers.

The ice gave a wall for nothing; now the wall must be bought at a price, or left to another.