What would our forefathers have thought of that historic day, when the beleaguered garrison of Ladysmith was fiercely assaulted, and we—seven thousand miles distant—knew what was being done; hearing that the heroic defenders were “hard-pressed,” and no more? Hours of agonised impatience were lived through; not only in England, but in many a far-off Colony beyond the Ocean, all waiting for the result. Not that the news might not have been sooner sent from South Africa. Delay was due to the cutting short of local sunshine, so that a heliographic message could not be flashed across a few miles of veldt.
This great advance has come about, not by improvements in the world’s shipping, though such improvements have not been small, but by means of the Electric Cable.
Not over the Ocean, but under the Ocean, messages are despatched with lightning speed, from man to man, in all parts of the civilised Earth.
Nor is this all. Quite lately another and still more marvellous means of communication has been discovered; a means which, if successfully followed out, as seems now probable, will tend still further to revolutionise the life of ships at sea.
By means of Wireless Telegraphy man can exchange thoughts with man, when the two are separated by many miles of distance. Watchers on a lonely lightship, far from land, can appeal in trouble to their friends on shore. The Admiral of a great war fleet can send his voiceless commands through space, unhampered by wire or cable, unhindered by fog or storm.
Not under the water, but through or above the water these messages journey; and in the course of time, this last new method of signalling may even largely supersede the use of submarine cables. Smaller and smaller grows our world, as greater and greater become the possibilities of intercourse between places and countries, the inhabitants of which, not very long ago, were cut off from one another by months of arduous travel. Distance is a matter of time, not of miles. England is nearer now to her Indian Dominions than she was two hundred years ago to Italy.
The enormous importance of the command of the sea to the inhabitants of Great Britain is, perhaps, more fully realised at the present time by Britons generally than ever before.
Other Nationalities are compact, homogeneous, self-contained, self-supporting. They have sometimes their Colonies over the water, more or less mere excrescences, additions hooked on for a purpose, separation from which would entail no vital loss to the ruling country. The word “Mother-country” would be a misnomer in such cases.
But with Great Britain her over-sea Colonies are an essential part of the “body-politic”—no more to be lopped off without injury and peril to the whole Empire, than a man’s limbs can be lopped off without suffering, and loss of blood, and danger to his life.
This great Empire of modern days is reckoned to contain “between eleven and twelve millions of square miles” of land; and “in round numbers four hundred millions” of subjects.