530 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



savagest tribesman to the intellectual but archaic civilization of ancient 

 Asiatic nationalities. 



Concerning the British Empire, and comparing it with other em- 

 pires, ancient, recent or now existing, its two most remarkable features 

 are its prodigious and long-continued growth and the persistency of its 

 power. It cannot to all seeming grow much larger, from lack of expan- 

 sive possibility. But it is unprofitable to predict. Every step which has 

 been taken in the way of extension, particularly of late years, has been 

 against the wishes, and in almost passionate opposition to the views of 

 large sections of the people. Yet the process of enlargement has gone 

 on continually, being often in actual despite of a Government, whose 

 members find themselves powerless to prevent absorptions and concre- 

 tions which they would gladly avoid. Objections to this perpetual 

 growth of empire in territory, and to the resulting responsibility which 

 we not altogether willingly accept, are unanswerable theoretically. The 

 too heavy and continually increasing strain upon our military resources 

 every one can appreciate. The limit in power of the strongest navy in 

 the world is at least as obvious as the vital necessity that our Navy be 

 largely and ungrudgingly strengthened. Naturally the cry of cautious, 

 patriotic men is the same now that it has always been — 'Consolidate 

 before you step farther.' In India, owing to conscientious and strenu- 

 ous opposition to every suggestion of expansion, and to the almost vio- 

 lent form which that opposition often took, our progress has been on the 

 whole slow and comparatively safe. "We have (I, of course, avoid all 

 allusion to very recent policy) as a rule consolidated, strengthened 

 ourselves, and made our ground sure before another advance. But there 

 is a general impression that in other parts of the world we have been 

 hastily and unfortunately acquisitive, whether we could help it or not: 

 that the new provinces, districts and protectorates are some of them 

 weak to fluidity; that the great and unprecedented growth of the Empire 

 has led to a stretching acid thinning of its holding links which are over- 

 strained by the weight of unwieldy extension and far beyond the help 

 of a protecting hand. I hope to be able to show that in some impor- 

 tant respects this suspicion is not altogether true; that science, human 

 ingenuity and racial energy have given us some compensations, and 

 that it is not paradoxical nor incorrect to say that our recent enormous 

 growth of empire has been everywhere accompanied by a remarkable 

 shrinkage of distances — by quicker and closer intercommunication of all 

 its parts one with another and with the heart center. In short, the 

 British Empire, in spite of its seemingly reckless outspread, its some- 

 times cloudy boundaries, its almost vague and apparently meaningless 

 growth, is at the present day more braced together, more manageable, 

 and more vigorous as a complete organization than it was sixty years 

 ago. The difference between its actual extent in the last year of the 



