abundance of coal. The importance of these deposits is enhanced by the circumstance that all other coal found on the Pacific coast from Cape Horn northward to Puget Sound is of an inferior quality, {119} and limited in quantity. San Francisco itself obtains a large part of its coal from Vancouver Island in the north, or from the British colony of New South Wales on the other side of the Pacific. Looking East and West, then, the Dominion has its maritime position confirmed by its supplies of coal. This is not all. Deposits extending over thousands of square miles have been discovered midway in the great prairie region, at once solving the fuel problem for a treeless country and supplying the force that carries trade and population across the continent. Later discoveries in the Rocky Mountains indicate the presence there of an anthracite coal peculiarly adapted to naval use, and likely to supply our ships in the Pacific with fuel of a quality equal to any that British mines can furnish. The facts of Canada's maritime position thus broadly stated will, I think, leave on most minds the impression that should the country pass under a foreign flag, so that British ships could claim only the rights of aliens in the harbours of the Atlantic and Pacific, or even under an independent flag, when they could enjoy only the rights of neutrals, the change would mean a complete revolution in the conditions under which British commerce is protected, and the influence of the nation maintained on the two oceans. There is, again, a military as well as a naval aspect from which to regard Canada's geographical relation to the Empire. {120}