Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/539

Rh century and its size at the date of the Queen's accession can be estimated by a glance at a remarkable series of maps published in the 'Statesman's Year-book for 1897/ while since 1897, and at this instant as we all know well, its mighty bulk is being still further increased.

The world as a whole has strangely contracted owing to a bewildering increase in lines of communication, to our more detailed geographical knowledge, to the formation of new harbors, the extension of railways, the increased speed and the increased number of steamships, and the greatly augmented carrying power of great sailing vessels built of steel. Then, hardly second in importance to these influences are the great land lines and the sea-cables, the postal improvements, the telephones, and perhaps we may soon add the proved commercial utility of wireless telegraphy. This universal time diminution in verbal and personal contact has brought the colonies, our dependencies, protectorates, and our dependencies of dependencies, closer to each other and all of them nearer still to us. Measured by time-distance, which is the controller of the merchant and the cabinet minister just as much as of the soldier, the world has indeed wonderfully contracted, and with this lessening the dominions of the Queen have been rapidly consolidating. Nor is this powerful influence by any means exhausted. In the near future we may anticipate equally remarkable improvements of a like kind, especially in railways, telegraph lines and deep-sea cables, and in other scientific discoveries for transmitting man's messages through water, in the air, or perhaps by the vibrations of the earth. For us particularly, railway schemes of expansion must be mainly relied upon to open up and connect distant parts of the Empire. Our true and only trustworthy road of intercommunication between the heart of the Empire and its limits must always be the sea. For general trade purposes, such as the convenience of business travelers, all continental lines and all the great projected railways will be helpful, whatever nation controls them; but our certain security is the sea, the sea which protects us, which has taught us to be an Imperial people. But if we ever forget that, there may be a calamitous awakening. We must not be persuaded to build—or at any rate to place reliance upon—land roads or railways through regions inhabited by tribes and peoples over whom we have not complete military as well as political control. Persian, Arabian, North African railway projects are happily rarely heard of now. As national enterprises they never were and never could be practicable, or otherwise than dangerous mistakes. We are a world-power solely because of our warships and because of our command of the sea. In the future also we shall remain a world-power only so long as we hold command of the sea in the fullest sense of the term, not merely by the force and efficiency of the fighting Navy, but by the excellence and the perfecting of our mercantile marine, by increasing its magnitude, carrying