can safely assume that if one cause of his latter ill-health was political worry another cause may well have been the Naval rivalry of a Power which boasted 4,000,000 of a trained Army to Britain's 250,000 men. With all these varied home duties and his many diplomatic efforts King Edward never forgot his own external Empire, never overlooked his vast interests overseas. To India in 1908 had gone a vivid and statesmanlike Royal Message, on November 2d, which recalled to the minds of its Princes and peoples their fifty years of progress under the Crown, the obligations which they were under to the liberty-loving rule of Britain, and the pride of their Emperor in governing so vast a congeries of races and interests. To them also in 1906 he had sent the Prince and Princess of Wales in a tour which repeated his own triumphs of 1876. To South Africa, upon frequent and appropriate occasions, came expressions of the King's interest in the people's welfare, in their strivings for unity, in their efforts to retrieve the misfortunes of war. It was King Edward's Imperial policy that dictated the sending of the Prince of Wales to open the first Parliament of the Union of South Africa--a policy which his own death rendered impossible--as curiously enough, it had been Queen Victoria's last public duty to send the Duke of Cornwall--as he then was--to open the first Parliament of the Australian Commonwealth. It was the King who sent the Duke of Connaught to visit East Africa in 1906 and Prince Arthur of Connaught to return from Japan _via_ Canada in the same year. To the people of Australia Lord Northcote, the new Governor-General, on January 28, 1904, conveyed a Royal Message of greeting and then proceeded to say that: "Every constitutional process having for its object the linking together of the different component parts of this great Empire is sure to be sympathetically regarded by our Sovereign and I know his hope is that his people who live outside the narrow seas of Great Britain may believe that His Majesty regards them primarily, not as inhabitants of colonies or dependencies of the Mother-country, but as equally valued component parts of one mighty nation."