It may be certain, therefore, that the opening of the canal will be followed by a rapid growth of exports from Canadian ports, serving a thousand miles of hinterland, many of the vessels returning laden with the manufactures of the eastern United States and Europe, both streams of traffic flowing through the isthmian canal. But we must not overlook the growth in passenger traffic. The sea-passage round by the canal from Europe to the Pacific states of North America will be much cheaper and to many people more pleasant than the fatiguing transcontinental railway journey. Fresh brain and muscle will enter Canada by its western portals, new needs will arise, new industries spring up, a new aeon of progress and enterprise begin on the far Pacific slopes when the first vessel mounts and descends the mighty steps of this wonder-working isthmian highway. THE WEST INDIES. But there is another region of the British Empire which will benefit only less, if less at all, than the Pacific province of Canada. The West Indies will feel at once the throb of a new life and interest when the canal is thrown open to the world's traffic. These "pearls of ocean," the oldest of England's oversea possessions, have lain hitherto in what the Americans call a "dead end." They are thrown across the entrances to a land-girt sea, the Mediterranean of the New World, from which there has hitherto been no exit to the west or the south, but only a return by the same passages to east and north. A glance at a map will show how these islands, the Greater and Lesser Antilles,[22] cluster round the Atlantic end of the canal and beset all the possible sea-routes from east and north and south-east. Every vessel that makes from the Atlantic for the canal entrance or quits the canal for the Atlantic will have to pass through this star-thick storied archipelago. The islands naturally fall into two groups, with the names I have just mentioned. The Greater Antilles, lying further to the west and north-west, consist of Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, these last being administered by Jamaica. To this group belongs, geographically and historically, the mainland colony of British Honduras, a territory rather larger than Wales, whose great value England has scarcely begun to appreciate. The Lesser Antilles, stretched like a jewelled coronet round the eastern entrance to the Caribbean, consist, north to south, of the Virgin Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica (these forming the Leeward Islands Confederation), St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, and Tobago (the Windward Islands). With this group goes naturally British Guiana, on the continent east of the Spanish Main, a territory much larger than Great Britain, which should also begin to develop its vast resources more adequately when the canal is opened.