8 ALL AFLOAT 



has nearly half of the whole world's mer- 

 cantile marine; and the United Kingdom 

 alone builds more than three-fifths of the 

 world's new tonnage every year. When all 

 the other elements of sea-power are taken into 

 consideration — the people who are directly 

 dependent on the sea, the values constantly 

 afloat, the credits involved, the enormous 

 advantages enjoyed, and the clinching fact that 

 British naval defeat means disaster and disaster 

 means ruin — when all this is brought into the 

 reckoning, it is safe to say that the combined 

 maritime interests of the British Empire 

 practically equal those of all the rest of the 

 world put together. When it is also re- 

 membered that Canada, itself a land of water- 

 ways, contains a third of the total area of the 

 Empire, and lies between the Atlantic and 

 Pacific oceans, the significance of these facts 

 is placed beyond a doubt. 



Take a very different illustration — the speech 

 of Canada to-day — and the significance is still 

 the same. We have so many sea terms in 

 our ordinary English speech that we almost 

 forget that they are sea terms at all till we 

 compare them with corresponding idioms in 

 other languages. Then we realize that only the 

 Dutch, the Finns, and the Scandinavians can 



