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532 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 us 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 dependencies, 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 addition 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 modifications, 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 controlled 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 necessary for us to remember the Pekin catastrophe—how we suffered from those dreadful intervals of dead silence, when we could not even communicate directly with our own naval officers at Taku,or with anyone beyond 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 Weihai-Wei, our permanent military outpost on the mainland.

Now to give some suggestions of the increased facilities for carrying merchandise, for conveying passengers quickly about the world, and for the sending of messages to all parts of the earth, a few, a very