It will be necessary to speak of the three insular divisions of the Australasian colonies separately, but it is in regarding them as a whole that we get an adequate idea of the great place which they hold {194} and may continue to hold in the Empire. Their populations are, and will continue to be, more purely British than any countries yet occupied by Anglo-Saxon people. Ninety-five per cent. of the inhabitants, whether born in the colonies or in the mother-land, are British. There is here nothing to parallel the elimination of the Anglo-Saxon element which is taking place so rapidly in the United States. There is no French province, with its individual lines of development, as in Canada. There is no large Dutch element, as in South Africa. The coloured population which may be found necessary for the cultivation of the tropical north, will be strictly subordinated to the necessities of British development, and there will never be in Australia, as there is in the United States, an immense coloured vote to confuse national politics. As a base of maritime power the Australasian colonies manifestly furnish to the nation of which they are a part an opportunity for maintaining a supreme and indisputable control over a vast area of the southern seas. Their harbours, some of which are amongst the most capacious in the world are yet for the most part capable of secure defence. Several are already supplied with docks, spacious enough to admit for repair the largest ships afloat. The more important are already strongly fortified. Melbourne is pronounced by competent authorities to be one of the best defended ports in the Empire. In New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand, great neighbouring coal {195} deposits increase the value of the harbours as stations for either carrying on or protecting trade. Still more important, they have behind them great and increasing populations, capable of supplying adequate means of local defence. It is manifest that such colonies may be a great element of strength in any nation, and especially in one which chiefly depends for security on naval power. Along with South Africa in the Southern Hemisphere they complete what I have before called the quadrilateral of maritime position which in the Northern Hemisphere is represented by the United Kingdom itself and Canada, with the commanding outlook of the latter upon the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Australasia and South Africa, however, projected as they are far into the water hemisphere of the globe, give a far more complete monoply of naval position than do the northern angles of this quadrilateral. A great sea power enjoying the right to their exclusive use would in any conflict have an immeasurable advantage in maintaining command of the ocean. The facts which indicate the industrial relation of Australasia to the rest of the Empire are scarcely less significant than those connected with naval position.