The British Empire--holding Australia and New Zealand with an audacious but thin garrison; having a long chain of strategic stations such as Hong Kong and Singapore; having in India a powerful rear base for supplies; holding a great part of the North-West Coast of America with a population as yet scanty but beginning to develop on the same lines as the Australasian people--is clearly well situated to win and to hold the mastery of the Pacific. Such mastery would have to be inspired with peaceful ideals; it could not survive as an aggressive force. It is indeed the main strength of the British position in the Pacific that it is naturally anxious, not for a disturbance but for a preservation of the present state of things, which gives to the British Empire all that a reasonable ambition could require. It is wise and easy to be peaceable when one has all the best of the spoils. For a secure British mastery of the Pacific, India would need to be held with the military assistance of South Africa and Australia, and made a great naval base; Australia and New Zealand would need to be populated seriously; Canada would need to be guarded against absorption by the United States and its new population kept as far as possible to the British type; the friendship and co-operation of the United States would need to be sought. Turning next to the United States it will be recognised that she has in a realised form all the force and wealth possible to an organised China or a fully developed Australia. She has one hundred million people, who have reached the highest stage of civilised organisation. Their material wealth--and wealth counts for much in modern war--is almost incalculable. Their national ambition has never been checked by defeat. Lately it has been fed with foreign war and territorial conquest and it has found the taste good. The American people face the future possessed of all the material for a policy of aggressive Imperialism and with a splendidly youthful faith in their own good motives, a faith which can justify an action better than any degree of cynicism. There is as much of the "old Adam" in them as in the peoples of any of the "effete monarchies," and many circumstances seem to point to them as anxious to take the lead among the White Races in the future. As regards the Pacific, American ambition is clear. The United States holds the Philippines at great expense of treasure and blood. She is fortifying Honolulu, with the idea of making it a naval base "stronger than Gibraltar."[1] She is cutting the Panama Canal and fortifying the entrances with the probable purpose of giving to the United States a monopoly of that gateway in time of war. With splendid audacity the American despises secrecy in regard to his future plans. In New York Naval Yard three years ago I was informed, with an amplitude of detail that was convincing, of the United States' scheme for patrolling the whole Pacific with her warships when the Canal had been finished.