More significant still are the submarine cables which aggregate 1,751 in number and over 200,000 miles in length and which annually transmit more than 6,000,000 messages, annihilating the time and distance which formerly separated nations. When King William IV of England died in 1837, the news was thirty-five days in reaching America. But when Queen Victoria passed away January 22, 1901, at 6:30 P. M., the afternoon papers describing the event were being sold in the streets of New York at 3:30 P. M. of the same day! As I rose to address a union meeting of the English speaking residents of Canton, China, on that fateful September day of 1901, a message was handed me which read, ``President McKinley is dead.'' So that by means of the submarine cable, that little company of Englishmen and Americans in far-off China bowed in grief and prayer simultaneously with multitudes in the home land. Not only Europe and America, but Siberia and Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia, Korea and the Kameruns, Laos and Persia are within the sweep of this modern system of intercommunication. The latest as well as one of the most important links in this world system is the Commercial Pacific Cable between Manila and San Francisco. President Roosevelt gave a significant illustration of the perfection of this system when, on the completion of the Commercial Pacific Cable July 4, 1903, he flashed a message around the earth in twelve minutes, while a second message sent by Clarence H. Mackay, President of the Pacific Cable Company, made the circuit of the earth in nine minutes. What additional possibilities are involved in the wireless system of telegraphy we can only conjecture, but it is already apparent that this system has passed the experimental stage and that it is destined to achieve still more amazing results. A startling illustration of its possibilities was given by the Japanese fleet March 22, 1904. A cruiser lay off Port Arthur and by wireless messages enabled battleships, riding safely eight miles away, to bombard fortifications which they could not see and which could not see them. Commerce has taken swift and massive advantages of these facilities for intercommunication. Its ships whiten every sea. The products of European and American manufacture are flooding the earth. The United States Treasury Bureau of Statistics (1903) estimates that the value of the manufactured articles which enter into the international commerce of the world is four billions of dollars and that of this vast total, the United States furnishes 400,000,000, its foreign trade having increased over 100 per cent. since 1895. While the bulk of the foreign trade of the United States is with Europe, American business men are gradually awaking to the greatness of their opportunity in Asia. A characteristic example of their aggressiveness was given when President James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railroad, testified before a Government Commission, October 20, 1902:--