in the acquisition of knowledge, independent in thought. They were not devoted to the forlorn prosody of the antiquated mandarins called clerical schoolmasters; they were not bound by the red tape of lazy officialdom. Their diplomatists could do a good stroke of business for their nation, and have made sport of every politician and arbitrator of the old country, from Shelburne to Ashburton and Alverstone.

They crushed out, or bought out, Spanish opposition, and openly befooled the Cabinets of England during the philosophical and humanitarian or utterly foolish and ignoble laissez faire period of the Manchester school, which Captain A. Mahan holds up to the scorn of both hemispheres.*

The prophecy of Napoleon came true; once possessed of the valley of the Mississippi, the Pacific lay before the explorers who went up its affluents to the peaks of Colorado.

I advise my audience to study carefully Carpenter's most interesting volume, The American Advance, for further details, rather than the following outlines.

Florida was ceded by Spain in 1819.

In 1846 Oregon County was settled in spite of the rights of the British, and the Pacific was reached.

In 1848, after being defeated in war, the Mexicans gave Arizona, California, Utah, and Nevada, to the States for $15,000,000-this was a profitable purchase; San Francisco and the other ports were worth one hundred times the money, and, moreover, more than £200,000,000 worth of gold has been extracted from California since then. In 1858 more Mexican territory was acquired by the Gadsden purchase.

In 1867 Alaska was purchased from Russia for $7,200,000. Our statesmen could have had Delagoa Bay about the same time for one-fourth the sum; indeed, they could have had Alaska if they had been wise betimes. Large territories were cheap after the Crimean War, when French and English were able to bombard and rob China and Japan on the flimsiest of pretexts or for mere villainous lust of wealth; the sale of opium or any other pretence was then stick enough to wield against yellow men; but to bombard New York would have been a different matter.

The United States became a military power during their Civil War, and put the Monroe Doctrine and other ingenious instruments of empire to handy uses, and seized upon every possible opening to sea power with greater and more successful zeal than even Russia itself.

In 1872 the British arbitrated about Juan Island, and, of course, lost. The arbitrator was the new Emperor of Germany * See The Interests of America in Sea Power, pp. 227-250.

-of that Germany which had become conscious of power, and had become one and indivisible again at Versailles in 1871.

In the year 1898 the centre of the United States was moved from Kansas to California. There came to them a New America and a New Pacific.

Poor Spain ceded Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines and Guam in 1899, and thus the United States are ready to control any Panama or other Isthmian Canal, and are across the Pacific facing Asia, in the numerous and rich islands, where the Portuguese navigator Magellan met his death in 1521, and having also seized Hawaii interpose between Fiji and Australia and Canada.

The British Governments have done everything they possibly could since 1840 to check the development of Canada and to give Columbia to the United States.

I quite agree with Canadian soldiers and statesmen who told me that the Society and Eton and Oxford folk of Downing Street and the Cabinet were far more dangerous than even the most unscrupulous Yankees.

But if the Imperial Government was blind to the Empire's best interests, so was not Sir John MacDonald. An anonymous writer, Augescat, summarises the strategical position of the Canadian Pacific Railway so well, that, albeit I dislike reading in a lecture, I will quote his statement, merely presuming that any officer here who has studied Mahan's Interests of America in Sea Power, will recognise with admiration the services of Sir John MacDonald in giving us Esquimalt, if he did nothing else, and will agree with my scorn of the "heads" of schools who prevented the War Office from allowing the instructors of our cadets to teach them the geography of our Empire.

Sir John MacDonald, I say, was worth a score of our political vote-catchers.

By the year 1870 he saw that Canada must make tremendous efforts if she meant to secure an outlet to the Pacific. "It is quite evident to me," he wrote, "from advices received from Washington, that the United States Government are resolved to do all they can, short of war, to get possession of the western territory, and we must take immediate steps to counteract them. One of the first things to be done is to show unmistakably our resolve to build the Pacific Railway." This Canada, inspired by the great pioneer of Imperial unity, was able to do the following year, and British Columbia was saved. It is curious,

to say the least of it, that this colossal undertaking, whose strategical importance was noted in a burst of envious admiration by Li Hung Chang, received little or no consideration or no encouragement from the Mother Country. But by so much

the more is Canadian glory the greater. The Transcontinental railway, with British Columbia at the end of it is a monument to the genius of Sir John MacDonald as it is to the political ability of the people who put their trust in him. That it is of immense value to the Empire as well as to Canada every year demonstrated more clearly. Save for its many fine ports, the Union Jack of England waves nowhere along the Pacific shore line from the Horn to Behring Sea.

Reaching out towards Asia, as Nova Scotia reaches out towards Europe, the distance between Liverpool and the Far East by way of its chief town, Vancouver, is shorter a thousand miles than the route by way of New York and San Francisco. Moreover, the ocean current, which leaves the coast of Asia, flowing eastward to the American Continent, gives to ships bound for a north-western port a gain of twenty miles every twenty-four hours. But these advantages, great as they are, would be of little value without a supply of good coal, of which British Columbia possesses an inexhaustible supply, whereas elsewhere on the coast it is poor in quality and limited in quantity. Esquimalt, fortified by Canada and England, is thus a naval base of the utmost importance-in fact, the key to Imperial supremacy in the North Pacific."

Eastwards there is no other coaling-station nearer than Hong Kong, southwards no nearer than Fiji. In time of war it will serve the English Navy to as good purpose as the want of it will paralyse the fleet of an enemy. Opposite stands Vancouver, the terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway, by means of which England can land troops in China in half the time it would take by way of Suez or the Cape. But had Sir John MacDonald and the people of the Dominion been converts to the Manchester School, with the statesmen and people of the Mother Country in the sixties and seventies, Russia would now have a distinct advantage over the British Empire. Our Empire would have no trade route to rival the Trans-Siberian Railway; it would have no naval base from which to dominate the North Pacific; it would have no Vladivostock or Port Arthur in Esquimalt. These are Canada's qualifications to the magnificent sum of our Imperial might.

Augescat has written much more and strongly about these great issues, and so do Colquhoun and others who treat of the "mastery of the Pacific "—but I must not trend on politics.

The British Empire, therefore, gentlemen, has at least one of the keys of the Pacific on the American coast, and it is at this moment guarded by our soldiers and sailors, the comrades of the officers, non-commissioned officers and privates of the Irish garrison, and I may say en passant that the strategic importancę

of Ireland has been quadrupled since Arthur Wellesley and his merry men started from Cork for Portugal in 1808.

To be honest, gentlemen, I personally would rather, had I to live again, be one of the sergeants in the Inniskilling Dragoons, whom I see before me, and whose celebrated and castellated insignia remind me of the capital of the county of the old sept of my Celtic ancestors, than be a wire-puller in Westminster; and I know something about both soldiers and politicians.

I should like to dwell on existing and future ship canals and their strategic influence; especially one linking the Pacific and the Atlantic; and on the Atlantic and Pacific railways of the United States; and on the strategic position as to Asia and America of Australasian ports; but I am ordered to Japan.

Of course Japan cannot strike at Russian territory in a few days, as Germany attacked France in 1870, nor can the Japanese, however victorious, hope to invest Moscow as the Germans did Paris. But Russia will suffer terribly if not able to secure command of the sea, and what I read yesterday (February 10th) in the train leads me to suppose that she has lost command of the sea already. If so, Japan is morally and commercially safe-as safe as were the British after 1805. But though mere sea power may secure island folk, it will not enable them to crush adversaries. Soldiers must complete the work of the navy. Napoleon was never so powerful as in 1806 and 1807, two years after the ruin of his navy at Trafalgar. I now proceed, by the aid of the blackboard, to draw the mountains, rivers, lines of communications of Korea and Manchuria, and of the South of France, the Iberian Peninsula, and of Italy and the Balkan Peninsula, and to point out the resemblances between the strategy in the Pacific to-day and in the Mediterranean in past centuries.

Please consult your maps when you go home, and follow the conditions of success more carefully. No power has ever been able to secure a conquest of one of these European peninsulas against a state which had command of the sea and could land expeditionary forces. I believe Japan can land 300,000 men in Korea, and I believe she can start raids against the Russian communications, following the example of the Russian partisans of 1812 to 1814, and of American cavalry, 1862 and 1864. She can get brigands, Chunchuses, and Chinese to worry the enemy's rearward communications, even as did Spanish guerillas, 1808-1813, and French francs-tireurs in 1870, and Boer guerillas, 1900-1902.

If so, even if Japan cannot reach Kharbin and the Russians cross the Yalu, the war may be prolonged and followed by another, even as the Waterloo campaign of 1815 followed the

long Peninsular War; but the Japanese will not be beaten in the long run, if true to themselves and mindful of the lessons of history.

Your predecessors in the Army, which has done more hard fighting in every part of the world than any other fighting force that ever existed,* maintained the struggle against all the superior resources of the French, against Napoleon's tariff wall, and his maritime allies, by reason of command of the sea by the shores of the Atlantic, and by expeditionary forces for twenty-two years a century ago, at a cost to our own people of £1,000,000,000. The coasts of the Pacific are now involved in another awful struggle, which must have even greater moral, industrial, and strategic results.

To our people, who are again quite unprepared for war, the present struggle is another warning from the immortal and never dubious oracle of time:-If you want peace or honour or victory, commerce or art or literature, prepare for war in time of peace.

When I had the honour of lecturing to your Society a year before the outbreak of the recent war in South Africa, I said :

We can hold our own; let us resolve to do so. I know that my hearers do all they can by way of precept and example. Every man who dons the national uniform sets a good example; but the masses of our people and our party leaders have lived in such security during so long a period of peace, and they are so uneducated in military history, that they have a very vague notion of the conditions on which depends the true greatness of a State. War is terrible; but it may be sublime. The fall of a State, like ours, with its numbers and resources, through cowardice and indolence, or false philosophy or cant or hysterics, is even more terrible; and for a nation to be surprised out of its pre-eminence is worse than terrible-it is despicable.

Lord Roberts, in his address at that meeting, emphasised my remarks with the most solemn warnings of the necessity for preparation for a great struggle betimes. His warnings were not heeded by the Cabinet, and the result was the loss of 23,000 British lives, and, directly or indirectly, £500,000,000 of

money.

A thousand years scarce serve to form a State, a year can lay it in the dust, and when

Can man its shattered splendour renovate,

Recall its virtues past and vanquish time and fate?

T. MILLER MAGUIRE.

*The British Army fought eighty-five distinct campaigns in the reign of Queen Victoria, from the Saskatchewan River to the Crimea, from the Nile to Kabul and Chitral, from the Indus to the Salwyn, and from Sokoto and Bulawayo to Bushire, Delhi, and Pekin.