Not under the water, but _through_ or _above_ the water these messages journey; and in the course of time, this last new method of signalling may even largely supersede the use of submarine cables. Smaller and smaller grows our world, as greater and greater become the possibilities of intercourse between places and countries, the inhabitants of which, not very long ago, were cut off from one another by months of arduous travel. Distance is a matter of time, not of miles. England is nearer now to her Indian Dominions than she was two hundred years ago to Italy. The enormous importance of the command of the sea to the inhabitants of Great Britain is, perhaps, more fully realised at the present time by Britons generally than ever before. Other Nationalities are compact, homogeneous, self-contained, self-supporting. They have sometimes their Colonies over the water, more or less mere excrescences, additions hooked on for a purpose, separation from which would entail no vital loss to the ruling country. The word “Mother-country” would be a misnomer in such cases. But with Great Britain her over-sea Colonies are an essential part of the “body-politic”--no more to be lopped off without injury and peril to the whole Empire, than a man’s limbs can be lopped off without suffering, and loss of blood, and danger to his life. This great Empire of modern days is reckoned to contain “between eleven and twelve millions of square miles” of land; and “in round numbers four hundred millions” of subjects. The four hundred millions are not, like the hundreds of millions of Chinese, all together in one part, all surrounded by a single containing border. They are everywhere; in every clime; on every ocean; under tropical skies; around temperate seas; amid frozen plains. Each fraction of the Empire is divided from other fractions by the Ocean; and this makes needful, as an absolute essential to the integrity of the Empire, the command of leading Ocean-highways, by which the different portions are united. From England to India; from England to Canada; from England to Australia; from England to South Africa; from England to Gibraltar and Malta and Egypt; from England to lesser Dependencies innumerable--always the “roadway” is over-sea; always the route is across the ocean-waters. Those ocean highways are thronged by the Empire’s ships; and under those seas thousands of miles of stout cable in all directions serve as do the “speaking tubes” in some large business establishment. As surely as the existence of Great Britain depended in earlier days upon the strength of her Navy, so surely does the existence of the British Empire depend in these later days upon her command of the sea. Once let that vanish, and the Empire must fall to pieces.