CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CANAL AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

One of the most important results of the Panama Canal, one which is likely to have the largest influence on future political history, seems scarcely to have been noticed by writers on this subject. I have shown how much nearer Australia and New Zealand are brought to New York than to Liverpool, owing to the isthmian passage. They are brought of course proportionately nearer to the eastern provinces, which are also the governmental headquarters of Canada. But the moving away, so to speak, of these great countries from England, and their closer approximation to the great and growing branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock in America, has the effect of locating the centre of gravity of the English-speaking races more firmly and permanently than ever in the New World. When Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have grown for another quarter of a century, and the United States have reaped for so long the advantage in wealth and power of the new waterway, the little islands of the United Kingdom may begin to appear as a detached and distant fragment, rather than as the "heart and hearth," of the British Empire and the English-speaking world. In the eighteenth century, when the English plantations in America began to develop their manufactures and had increased rapidly in population, the question was discussed in England how long she could continue to control an oversea empire, likely to be in time more populous and prosperous than the home-country itself, from these far-away islands of the Old World. It was actually suggested at that time that the King of England should carry his crown and throne where the most part of his subjects were congregated. That suggestion is not likely to be repeated. We have found a way of harmonizing local self-government with imperial unity. But the position of England in her empire is sure to be greatly modified as time goes on, and the Panama Canal, by bringing these vast and undeveloped continents and isles of the far south-west so much nearer to North America than to the imperial centre, cannot fail to have some influence in this direction. From a commercial point of view, its effect will be to increase the value and importance of those trade preferences which Australia gives the home country in her markets.

Probably no single country in the world, certainly no portion of the British Empire, stands to gain so tremendously from the opening of the canal as British Columbia. England has not yet realized what enormous resources are locked up in this province of the furthest west, which looks out from a hundred harbours to the Pacific and across to the awakening East. The long haul across the continent, the interminable sea-trail round the Horn, twice crossing the equator, kept British Columbia, until lately, outside the thought and interest, not only of Englishmen, but even of the Canadians of the administrative East. Even with the gradual filling of the empty middle and west, geography would have continued to be against British Columbia. But the Panama Canal makes all the difference. This province will no longer look vaguely and dreamily to the western sea-spaces and a still half-slumbering Orient. She will suddenly find herself at one end of a sea-route which will shorten her distance from New York by 8,415 miles and from Liverpool by 6,046 miles.

Her timber and other produce will no longer toil wearily in the holds of the "windjammer" down the whole length of Northern, Central, and Southern America. There at Balboa, less than halfway down, is the entrance of the long-desired short-cut to the world-centres of progress and enterprise. The electric thrill of this new circuit will be felt not only along the havens and fjords of the British Columbian coast, but nearly a thousand miles inland. We may say that almost the whole western half of Canada, where the golden wheat frontiers are ever advancing, will face about and henceforth look west instead of east. All the corn and produce of Alberta and Western Saskatchewan will flow, not eastwards as heretofore, but to the Pacific shores, there to be shipped for transit _via_ the canal to the southern and eastern United States, to the north and east of South America, and to the Old World over the Atlantic. Even the eastern and western fronts of the Dominion will feel the grip of a new link, which may serve important naval and defensive interests for Canada.

The new Pacific outlet will have many advantages over the eastern. For one thing, it is always ice-free, whereas the eastern route is icebound for five months in the year. Even now, I understand, it is appreciably cheaper in winter to send wheat from Calgary to Liverpool by Vancouver than by St. John's, New Brunswick. The freight-rate between British Columbian and United Kingdom ports should be at least halved when the canal is in operation. Of all cities in any clime or hemisphere, Vancouver seems to stand most surely on the threshold of a new and mighty future. She will have "greatness thrust upon her." Her citizens are preparing for the spacious days that are about to set in. A "Great Vancouver" will probably arise from the nine local municipalities, to provide an area and administration worthy of the dawning era. Dr. F. B. Vrooman eloquently voiced the sentiment of the great port and of British Columbia at a recent luncheon of the Progress Club at Vancouver. He said:--

We are on the verge of nothing less than a revolution of the world's commerce, and industry, and finance, which now, as sure as fate, are destined to be transferred to the lands of the Pacific Ocean. It is not only revolution. It is such a revolution as never has been and never again can be foreordained before chaos primeval for this twentieth century of the Christian era, for there are no more hemispheres to cut in two. There are no more oceans, with half the water area on the world and twenty million square miles more than all the land surface of the globe, to be suddenly transferred into the arena of world trade. There are no more continents with the widest reaches, the richest resources, and the densest populations of the world to be awakened and developed after Asia has achieved its resurrection.

Therefore I say to you that there has got to be one port at least in the British Empire big enough to be equal to the greatest opportunity the world ever offered any city since time began. And if that city is not destined to be Vancouver, it will be for one, and for only one, reason--because the men of Vancouver have been too timid and feeble, too shortsighted and too little to take hold of what the good God has offered them.

I have already alluded to the question of coal in connection with the new canal. All the new routes will have to be cheaply and abundantly "coaled," or they will be at a great disadvantage in the competition for traffic with Suez. The Isthmian Canal Commission of 1899-1901 pointed out that the coaling stations at San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver will in the future bear about the same relation to the route _via_ the Panama Canal to the Orient as the coaling stations at or near the Suez Canal bear to the route from Europe _via_ Suez to the Orient. Among the Pacific Islands, at Colon and Panama, and among the West Indies coal will have to be stored in big quantities for the tramps and liners and warships which will soon be drawn along these seaways by the new canal. British Columbia has coal illimitable, and this interest alone ought to be quickly and mightily developed in the coming years. Happily there are men of imagination and public spirit in this great Pacific province of the empire who understand what the canal means to it in future wealth and welfare, and are preparing its people to take advantage of the new opportunities. Let an eloquent British Columbian, Dr. Vrooman again, open for us the broad and bright prospect:--

New markets will be found on the Atlantic for British Columbia lumber and paper. This new large demand will increase the price. But the saving of freight is an enormous item. The present freight-rates from Vancouver to Liverpool are sixteen dollars per 1,000 feet. The canal will give British Columbia a rate of about eight dollars per 1,000 feet. This difference per 1,000 will add to the value of British Columbia timber destined for Europe. But it is for more reasons than this that British Columbia is destined to be a vast Imperial industrial workshop. While her agricultural and horticultural possibilities are far beyond what is generally supposed, British Columbia is in natural resources and raw materials of industry one of the richest areas on the globe. But above all is she rich in mechanical power--water-power and coal. These are about to be opened up and developed. Their development soon will be beyond computation, for, roughly speaking, there is not an investment in British Columbia to-day which will not be directly increased in value by the new canal; but also much indirectly in the impetus given to development. This one thing--this canal--costing us nothing--will double, quadruple, and quintuple values out there in a few brief years. With easier access will come new trade, and new demands will create new products, and soon the innumerable water-powers of British Columbia will start the wheels of a thousand new industries. The illimitable resources of the province will be opened up, developed, and utilized at home or shipped abroad. The value of every town lot and of every acre of land of the 395,000 square miles of the province will be greatly enhanced; town sites will be hewed out of the forests, and the forests themselves--every stick of wood of their 182,000,000 acres of forest and woodland--will be increased in value directly, by reason of cheaper shipping alone, to the extent of several dollars per 1,000 feet; and in the items of lumber and wood-pulp alone the Panama Canal will make as a free gift to British Columbia considerably more than the United States is spending on the whole canal.

The mines of British Columbia, which have already produced over L70,000,000, will leap forward with renewed prosperity. Her fisheries, which have produced L21,000,000, will be more extensively developed and, let us hope, be made again a British asset--since they are wholly in the hands of the Japanese, who not only send their earnings home to Japan, but are criminally wasteful in their methods. The coal deposits of the province, which promise to be the most extensive in the world, will, with immense deposits of iron, be opened to the world's markets. It is said that the coal-fields of one small district in the Kootenay are capable of yielding 10,000,000 tons of coal a year for over seven thousand years, and a new district has been discovered within a twelvemonth which the provincial mineralogist told me on Christmas Eve was the most important economic discovery ever made in British Columbia, where there are known to be 1,000 square miles of the best of anthracite, and which is probably the richest known anthracite district in the New World west of Pennsylvania.[21]

The references to coal are especially interesting in this passage. It is an evidence of the public alertness in this matter that the British Columbian government has just appointed a special commissioner "to investigate and report upon all circumstances and conditions incident to the production and sale or other disposition of coal in British Columbia."

It may be certain, therefore, that the opening of the canal will be followed by a rapid growth of exports from Canadian ports, serving a thousand miles of hinterland, many of the vessels returning laden with the manufactures of the eastern United States and Europe, both streams of traffic flowing through the isthmian canal. But we must not overlook the growth in passenger traffic. The sea-passage round by the canal from Europe to the Pacific states of North America will be much cheaper and to many people more pleasant than the fatiguing transcontinental railway journey. Fresh brain and muscle will enter Canada by its western portals, new needs will arise, new industries spring up, a new aeon of progress and enterprise begin on the far Pacific slopes when the first vessel mounts and descends the mighty steps of this wonder-working isthmian highway.

THE WEST INDIES.

But there is another region of the British Empire which will benefit only less, if less at all, than the Pacific province of Canada. The West Indies will feel at once the throb of a new life and interest when the canal is thrown open to the world's traffic. These "pearls of ocean," the oldest of England's oversea possessions, have lain hitherto in what the Americans call a "dead end." They are thrown across the entrances to a land-girt sea, the Mediterranean of the New World, from which there has hitherto been no exit to the west or the south, but only a return by the same passages to east and north. A glance at a map will show how these islands, the Greater and Lesser Antilles,[22] cluster round the Atlantic end of the canal and beset all the possible sea-routes from east and north and south-east. Every vessel that makes from the Atlantic for the canal entrance or quits the canal for the Atlantic will have to pass through this star-thick storied archipelago.

The islands naturally fall into two groups, with the names I have just mentioned. The Greater Antilles, lying further to the west and north-west, consist of Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, these last being administered by Jamaica. To this group belongs, geographically and historically, the mainland colony of British Honduras, a territory rather larger than Wales, whose great value England has scarcely begun to appreciate. The Lesser Antilles, stretched like a jewelled coronet round the eastern entrance to the Caribbean, consist, north to south, of the Virgin Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica (these forming the Leeward Islands Confederation), St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, and Tobago (the Windward Islands). With this group goes naturally British Guiana, on the continent east of the Spanish Main, a territory much larger than Great Britain, which should also begin to develop its vast resources more adequately when the canal is opened.

These islands, being largely inhabited by black people, cannot be entrusted with complete self-government like purely white communities. They are under various forms of what is known as crown colony government. For example, Trinidad and the Windward Islands are under the complete control of the British Colonial Office, while Barbados and Jamaica enjoy a large measure of self-rule. But this division into a large number of small governments without any connection with each other is extremely expensive, and proposals have been made for a federation of the British West Indies either in one great system, including them all, with British Honduras and Guiana thrown in, or in two systems embracing respectively the Greater and the Lesser Antilles.

England, it must be confessed, has treated her splendid West Indian empire very badly. In order that she might have sugar "dirt-cheap" at home she allowed the great staple product of the isles and mainland, cane-sugar, to be brought to the verge of ruin by the competition of European bounty-fed beet-sugar. Happily there was a statesman of strong imperial sympathies in England, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who arranged the Brussels Sugar Convention with certain Powers of Europe, all of which agreed to suppress their own bounties and to impose countervailing duties on bounty-fed sugar imported from countries outside the convention. This gave the West Indies a fairer chance of competition, and they quickly felt the benefit. But the convention was always opposed in England by certain industries in which sugar is used and is therefore wanted as cheap as possible, and notice has recently been given, despite the protests and alarms of the West Indies, that England intends to withdraw from the convention. And this, too, without any sort of compensation for the sugar-islands, which had begun to rely upon the protection against unfair competition afforded by that instrument.

England has withdrawn her garrisons and, what is still more serious, almost her entire navy from the West Indies. When the terrible earthquake occurred at Kingston in Jamaica in 1907, there was no English ship-of-war anywhere near to render help and to maintain order, and this duty had to be performed by vessels of the American fleet. Five days after that disaster the correspondent of _The Times_ wrote: "It is difficult to describe the sense of humiliation with which an Englishman surveys Kingston harbour this evening--two American battleships, three German steamers, a Cuban steamer, and one British ship; she leaves to-night, and the white ensign and the red ensign will be as absent from Kingston harbour as from the military basins of Kiel and Cherbourg." And this is what England calls ruling the waves and being mistress of the seas! Later in the same year she had another lesson. Rioting broke out in St. Lucia, once, but no longer, an important naval base. It was a whole week before an English cruiser arrived, though a Dutch man-of-war, the _Gelderland_, was anchored in the spacious harbour of Castries, St. Lucia's capital.

This, one must allow, is a slovenly way of conducting a great empire. If these methods are pursued after the Panama Canal is opened, the results will be disastrous. A complete change will have to be made in the attitude of England and the Colonial Office to the British West Indian Islands. For these islands, instead of being tucked away in a sort of cul-de-sac, or inland lake, will henceforth be thrown right across or alongside the main highways of the world's ocean-traffic. Look again at the map and see how the most direct sea-route from New York, the eastern states and Canada to Colon and Cristobal comes down through the Windward Passage, between Cuba and Haiti, and then right past the eastern end of Jamaica, quite close to the magnificent bay on which Kingston stands.

Look again and see how the routes from Liverpool, Southampton, and the Old World pass through the Lesser Antilles, either Leeward or Windward, further east. The most direct of these trails passes through the Virgin Islands, the most northerly group, and one of these is said to possess a harbour of which a good deal might be made. But this is not by any means the only line of approach to the entrance of the canal. A more southerly route near Barbados or Trinidad might be chosen, and certainly would be chosen by vessels intending to call at ports along the old Spanish Main.

Trinidad will indeed lie right across the direct route from ports on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada, as well as from the Far East, to Brazil and the Atlantic coast of South America--a trade which may well grow to very large proportions, considering the vast undeveloped resources of the Orinoco and Amazon basins. Valuable deposits of petroleum have also been discovered in Trinidad, and this should add greatly to the wealth and importance of that island as oil replaces coal for fuel. Oil-bunkering stations will be wanted at many points in the West Indies.

Trinidad and Kingston seem likely to benefit most from the traffic to and from Cristobal, the new Atlantic terminal of the canal. Both are splendidly equipped by Nature to act as coaling and repairing stations as well as centres for the distribution of goods. Kingston has a superb harbour, and so also has Port of Spain (the capital of Trinidad) in the Gulf of Paria, a natural landlocked harbour in which the fleets of the whole world could lie in safety--and, it is important to add, outside the hurricane zone. Trinidad lies right athwart the mouths of the Orinoco River. The years that are coming will see a tremendous development of the resources of these rich tropical basins, and Port of Spain is a natural port of exit and entry for the trade of regions where Raleigh sought the fabled Manoa or El Dorado.

It is too soon to try to indicate in detail the effects which the Panama Canal is likely to have on the trade and production of the islands themselves. The sugar industry is reviving under the influence of the Treaty of Reciprocity concluded between a large number of the islands and the Dominion of Canada. Probably the sugar for the tea-tables and apple-tarts of Vancouver, and a good many places far to the north and east, will be brought from the West Indies to Vancouver. But the islands will benefit more directly and immediately through the immense growth of traffic in the Caribbean Sea, the supply of coal and other necessities to this increased shipping, and in general through the publicity the islands will enjoy, which will mean a growing invasion of "globe-trotters," and consequently a big development of agricultural resources and an influx of new capital.

An almost certain and immediate result of the new route, I may say in passing, will be a large increase of the tourist traffic to England and Europe from the western coasts of North and South America. When the fares are lowered, and the traveller can do the journey wholly by water, without the trouble of changing from railroad to steamer, we may be sure that a rapidly growing tide of passengers will set eastwards as well as westwards through the canal.

But, to return to the West Indies, every nation is preparing to develop or establish in these regions harbours and coaling-stations and other facilities for its trade. For example, a Danish company proposes to establish connection between Copenhagen and San Francisco through the island of St. Thomas, one of the Virgin group. At St. Thomas, by the way, is shown the castle of Edward Teach, or "Blackbeard," the very beau ideal of a skull and crossbones pirate who, according to "Tom Cringle's Log," wore a beard in three plaits a foot long, and a full-dress purple velvet coat, under which bristled many pistols and two naked daggers over eighteen inches long, and who had generally a lighted match in his cocked hat with which he lit his pipe or fired a cannon, as the occasion demanded. "One of his favourite amusements when he got half-slewed was to adjourn to the hold with his compotators, and, kindling some brimstone matches, to dance and roar as if he had been the devil himself, until his allies were nearly suffocated. At another time he would blow out the candles in the cabin and blaze away with his loaded pistols at random right and left.... He was kind to his fourteen wives as long as he was sober, and never murdered above three of them." This very improper, but picturesque, gentleman was run down at last by H.M. frigates the _Lime_ and the _Pearl_ to a creek of North Carolina, where, with thirty men in an eight-gun schooner, he made a desperate fight for life, killing and wounding more than the number of his own crew, and dying where he fell, faint with the loss of blood, overcome by superior numbers alone. Whether "Blackbeard" ever inhabited the castle at St. Thomas may be questioned, but the island ought to benefit from the canal, as it lies right across the main entrance to the Caribbean from the Atlantic.

The German steamship lines are awake to the new opportunities, the Hamburg-Amerika preparing for the new emigrant traffic between Europe and Western America. Germany, it is said, is negotiating for a coaling-station in Hayti, which, with its two negro republics, stands to profit immensely from the new conditions. No one has troubled much about this splendid island of late. It has had a dark and terrible history. Discovered by Columbus, who called it _Hispaniola_, it was occupied by the Spanish adventurers who found alluvial gold there. Then it became the headquarters of the "buccaneers" who succeeded to the gallant and courtly sea-rovers of the Elizabethan period and became formidable about the year 1630. One of these buccaneers was that Henry Morgan who sacked the old town of Panama in 1671, and then became quite a respectable character, governor of Jamaica, and dubbed knight by Charles II. It was in Hispaniola, or Hayti, that this species of Western viking got their name. The island had been depopulated by the Spaniards, but the cattle and hogs they had introduced became wild and repopulated the land in their own kind. Thus Hispaniola became a splendid provisioning base for the ships of the buccaneers. They hunted the cattle and preserved the meat, smoke-drying it in the Indian fashion. This industry was called _boucanning_, and from it the buccaneers were named.

Hispaniola was the mother colony of the Spanish Empire in the West Indies which has now wholly disappeared, very unfortunately for Spain in view of the enhanced value these islands will now soon acquire. In 1795 it was ceded to France, and soon afterwards the emancipated slaves gained possession of the island, and after a period of anarchy and bloodshed established their independence. It is divided into two negro and mulatto republics, Hayti and San Domingo, and, as might have been expected, has sunk to the lowest depths of possible human degradation. Fetishism, human sacrifice, and even cannibalism prevail in this sea-girt Paradise, placed right among the possessions of the most civilized Powers of the world and now across the main ocean routes from the West to the United States, Canada, and the Old World. Can anybody believe that beautiful Hispaniola, an island 30,000 square miles in extent, whose economic and strategic value will be increased a hundredfold in the years that are coming, will long remain under this blighting shadow of ignorance and barbarism? Here certainly the Panama Canal will work a beneficent political change.

France, too, is beginning to look up her possessions and opportunities in the Caribbean. Here her two islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, are placed most conveniently for her ships coming westwards from Havre, Bordeaux, and St. Nazaire, while Tahiti and New Caledonia will pass them on over the Pacific to the Far East. M. Gilquin, writing in _La vie Maritime_, says:--

In Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia, and Tahiti our commerce--that is to say, exports and imports together--was, in the year 1909, ninety millions of francs; this rose to one hundred and twenty-two millions in 1910, and it is probable that when we get the figures for 1911 they will be found to be even more favourable. It is certain that with the opening of the Panama Canal a great increase in traffic will take place, and possessing, as we do, ports so advantageously placed on the principal lines of route, we should benefit extensively by that development of traffic between Europe and the western coasts of both North and South America. In order that we may reap the benefit, however, of the situation of our colonial harbours, it is necessary that these be taken in hand at once and rendered fit for the commerce they will be called upon to handle.

And what is England doing to prepare for the new epoch in these regions where she has planted her flag on so many rich and beautiful islands, strung like pearls of necklace and tiara over these warm tropical seas? We hear of Jamaica providing a new site for coaling and ships' repairs near Kingston, of harbour improvements at Port of Spain (Trinidad) and St. George (Grenada), of oil-bunkering stations at Barbados and St. Lucia. All this is good, but England will have to enter upon a very different policy for the future with regard to her West Indian empire. She must show that she values her priceless inheritance in and round the Caribbean; that she is determined to maintain her position, to promote her commerce, and to further the interests of all her subjects in these regions.

What the West Indies need in order to be able to take the new opportunity by the forelock are organization and combination. Schemes have been proposed for federalizing the constitution of the islands--placing them, that is, under a strong central government for those purposes that are common to them all. There are many difficulties in the way of such proposals. The nearest island of the Greater Antilles is 1,000 miles away from the nearest of the Lesser, so that Nature seems to have pronounced for the present against any federal scheme embracing all the islands. But space is always shrinking. Wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes may make 1,000 miles an inconsiderable distance for such political purposes. The Leeward Islands have already been organized under a single federal government, and it ought to be possible to extend the system. Moreover, the islands and the colonies on the continent are learning the value of common consultation and action in such matters as quarantine, and they meet together in annual agricultural conferences.

We need not wait for a formal and complete federal constitution. Some central council for consultation on the best means of taking advantage of the new opportunities, some central fund for promoting common objects, such as advertising the wonderful attractions of the islands and preparing for the birds of passage that will soon be coming from every civilized country in the Old and New World--all this is possible now. It is important, too, that the West Indian colonies should have some assembly or council through which they can address the Imperial Power with a single voice. England can give these colonies invaluable help. She can assist them to develop those steamship and telegraphic communications between the islands which are still so inadequate. She can indicate the best locations for harbours, coaling and repairing stations, and the other facilities which the new traffic will require. In view of the certain growth in wealth and prosperity, the colonies ought to be able by contributions among themselves to provide a substantial fund for objects they can carry out in common for the advantage of each and all.

Some valuable information and very practical suggestion will be found in the report of the West Indian Commission presided over by Lord Balfour of Burleigh which was issued in 1910. Besides recommending a system of reciprocal trade preference between Canada and the West Indies, the commissioners made important proposals with regard to steamship and telegraphic communications. They favoured the public ownership and operation of the West Indian cables and possibly of the whole system northward to Halifax. They wrote:--

The single cables now connecting Halifax with Bermuda and Bermuda with Jamaica ought either to be duplicated or supplemented by wireless. A cable should be laid between Bermuda and Barbados, with a branch to Trinidad, and perhaps another to British Guiana. The cables which run from Jamaica to the eastern islands and British Guiana, sometimes single and sometimes duplicate, are very old. The bed of this part of the Caribbean being trying for cables, we believe it would be found advantageous in most cases not to renew them, but to replace them by wireless installations. If these were well arranged, they might form a satisfactory connection between the eastern islands and Jamaica and an alternative route to Bermuda, and render unnecessary duplication of the suggested Bermuda-Barbados cable. While it is desirable to connect British Honduras with Jamaica, we consider that the probable volume of traffic would not warrant the cost of a cable. We therefore recommend the employment of wireless for this purpose. Small installations should also be supplied to the outlying Leeward and Bahamas Islands.

England will have to foster the welfare of her possessions in these regions as she has never done before. The Brussels Convention forbade her to give any preference to sugar produced in her own dominions. But she is about to step out of that agreement, and will be at liberty, if she thinks fit, to encourage by preferential favours the one great staple for which these colonies can find no substitute. There may be differences of opinion on the fiscal question, but surely everybody must agree that the naval power and political prestige of the British Empire must be represented in the Caribbean Sea by something rather more impressive than two small and obsolete cruisers. If England is to maintain her position against the severer competition she will now have to face, if she is to get her share of the new commerce now in prospect, she will have to give her traders, and shippers, and merchants all the confidence and encouragement which her flag should inspire. One or two well-equipped naval bases, a squadron of up-to-date cruisers for police and patrol work in the Caribbean and down the Pacific coasts of America, are indispensable. There must be no more earthquakes and destructions of British cities with never a British vessel to bring the sorely-needed help, no more riots in British islands with only a Dutch warship standing helplessly by.

Both British Columbia and the West Indies have complained with reason of the absenteeism of the British fleet from their shores. The necessity for concentrating all our naval power in the North Sea to meet the German menace has no doubt been the cause of these withdrawals from the outer sea-marches of the empire. But at any cost this wrong will have to be righted in the future. The West Indies and British Columbia are just the two portions of the empire which the Panama Canal may benefit most and most immediately, and they have a right to expect the support and co-operation of the imperial government wherever it can be given. All the Powers of the world will be afloat on the Caribbean and along the Pacific sea-trails to Balboa. Let the white ensign return to these seas and shores as an earnest to all that the same national spirit that won for England her political and commercial supremacy avails to maintain it now and in the new era which is just dawning.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] From the already-quoted paper read before the Royal Colonial Institute, March 19, 1912.

[22] Marco Polo, following Aristotle's nomenclature, had given the name of "Antilla" to an island off the eastern coast of Asia. The name was transferred by Columbus, or Peter Martyr, to the islands of the Caribbean.