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.