With Australia, including the Northern Territory, populated and defended, the strategical position of the British Empire on the Asiatic flank of the Pacific Ocean could be organised on a sound basis. An Imperial Fleet, contributed to by the Mother Country, by Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, and the Crown Colonies, having a rallying point at Singapore, could hold the Indian Ocean (which is to the Pacific what the Mediterranean is to the Atlantic) as a "British lake," and this powerful naval force would straddle the centre of the western littoral of the ocean, keeping secure the British communities in the south from the Asiatic communities in the north, and ready to respond to a call from Canada. On the western, as on the eastern flank, there is present all the "raw material" for Fleets and armies--great supplies of coal, oil, timber, metals, fecund fishing grounds, and enormous areas of agricultural and pastoral territory. When the strategical position of the United States in the Pacific comes to be examined, it is found to be for the moment one full of anxiety. The Power which may, five years hence, have undisputed hegemony of the ocean, holds a difficult position there to-day. The map will show that if the United States had had no expansion ideas at all, in the Pacific or elsewhere, national safety demanded that she should stretch out her arm to take in the Hawaiian Islands. This group, if held by an enemy, would be as a sword pointed to the heart of the Pacific States of the Republic: but held by the United States it is a buckler against any enemy from south or west. A foe approaching the United States Pacific coast would inevitably seek to occupy first the Hawaiian Islands and use them as a base: and just as surely would not dare to pass those islands leaving there an American Fleet. With Honolulu Harbour strongly fortified and sheltering a Fleet of any real fighting strength, the Pacific coast of the United States is safe from invasion by sea (invasion by land from Canada hardly needs to be considered; nor from Mexico). At the present time Honolulu is in the process of being fortified rather than is fortified: and a powerful American Fleet awaits the completion of the Panama Canal before it can enter the Pacific without leaving the Atlantic coast of the Republic unduly exposed.