The new canal rather diminishes the force of such similitudes. It is not simply that the east of Canada and the United States, as representing Western civilization, is brought much closer to China and Japan; that the passage from West to East which the early navigators vainly sought is now thrown open. The important thing is that the Pacific is going to be the scene of commercial and political rivalries in which the slowly awakening people of China and the already wide-awake people of Japan will take part. All the Pacific Ocean westward to 160 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich is brought nearer to England and the western coasts of Europe. The entire ocean right back to the western extremity of Australia is brought closer to the governmental and industrial centres of the United States and Canada. English people have been thinking "Atlantically" up to now. The Pacific, held at an unimaginable distance by a broad continent or an abyss of ocean, has been known to them chiefly through stories of adventure among its coral islands familiar to their childhood. Yet England is the greatest Pacific Power in the world. British Columbia alone has a Pacific sea-front longer than the United States, and holds 383,000 square miles, an area as large as France and Spain put together. And yet the population of that vast and fertile province is only 134,000. And what of the lonely continent that bounds this oceanic abyss in the far south-west? Australia, without New Zealand, is about 3,000,000 square miles in extent, and has to-day a white population of about 4,600,000, or about 4,700,000 people all told. The northern part of this mighty island-continent, known as the "Territory," 560 miles wide, 900 miles long, and 523,620 square miles in extent, a region of great potential wealth, has a total European population of 1,274! And to the north and north-west there are a billion (1,000,000,000) brown and yellow people, packed together in crowded islands and territories, whose mere overspill would quickly fill that delectable island-continent to the south where England has done so little to make good her nominal title to sovereignty by actual and effective settlement.