532 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



power and speed, and by anxiously attending to its recruitment by 

 English sailors. We must not attempt to overtax our resources to 

 guard railway lines through foreign semi-civilized or savage countries 

 by exported or local armies. A heavy land responsibility lies upon u& 

 already. Under a little more we might be easily overweighted and 

 crushed down. " We must concentrate all our surplus energies upon 

 our sea communications. Therefore the railway lines which I spoke of 

 as helping to consolidate the Empire in the near future are those only 

 which are projected or are being built in the various colonies and de- 

 pendencies, lines to distribute and to collect, to connect provinces, and 

 feed harbors. The mighty Canadian Pacific Railway is unique in the 

 Empire. It not only complies with all these requirements, but in addi- 

 tion it provides to Australia and the Eastern dependencies an alternative 

 road, convenient and safe. As I said before, all railways, wherever built, 

 will probably help us directly or indirectly in the long run, provided we 

 are never committed to the protection of any one of them outside of our 

 own boundaries. 



And what has been said about railways applies, with obvious modifi- 

 cations, to telegraph lines and to maritime cables. The more general 

 the extension of these, and the more numerous they become, the greater 

 benefit there will be to this country in its double capacity as the greatest 

 trader and the greatest carrier of merchandise in the world; while the 

 actual equivalent to a diminution of time-distance in traveling is to be 

 found in the instantaneous verbal message which can be despatched to 

 the most distant point of the Empire. But we ought certainly to join 

 all the shores of the Queen's dominions by sea-cables completely con- 

 trolled by British authority. To rely upon connection between our own 

 cables through telegraph systems stretching across foreign countries, 

 however friendly, or to permit the ends of these sentient nerves of 

 the Empire to emerge upon shores which might possibly become an 

 enemy's country, is dangerous to the point of recklessness, that parent 

 of disaster. As a melancholy instance of my meaning it is only neces- 

 sary for us to remember the Pekin catastrophe — how we suffered from 

 those dreadful intervals of dead silence, when we could not even com- 

 municate directly with our own naval officers at Taku,or with anyone be- 

 yond Shanghai, although we have in our possession a place of arms at 

 Wei-hai-Wei upon the Gulf of Pechili. It is obvious that we ought 

 to have an all-British cable for pure strategic purposes as far as Wei- 

 hai-Wei, our permanent military outpost on the mainland. 



Now to give some suggestions of the increased facilities for carry- 

 ing merchandise, for conveying passengers quickly about the world, 

 and for the sending of messages to all parts of the earth, a few, a very 



