So, with the extension of the idea, the growing size of the fleet, came greater ideas of expansion and greater powers of carrying it out. Success had produced confidence. Confidence had created greater boldness. Commerce had increased, and continued to increase, despite the continuous wars. Though the loss of ships was terrible, the merchant navy still went forth bravely upon the seas. Merchant princes must have had calm, philosophical heads to have recognised, as they must have done, an almost certain percentage of serious loss of both ship and cargo. Such loss was to be risked from the mouth of the Thames to the mouth of the Hudson, and yet still the traders sought the open sea. Is such a spirit alive now, or is the commercial dread of loss in the end of the nineteenth century greater than the commercial fearlessness of the early part of it? That only the next war can prove. But the next stage in the national growth which is clear in these bygone days, is that commercial expansion led to bold enterprises against the enemy’s colonies, on which his commerce much depended. It was so with the expansion of the Indian Empire on the one hand, and the American Empire, after the conquest of Canada from the French, on the other. Both led to yet another idea, of which earlier history could show no trace. The connection between these growing empires and the mother country was becoming increasingly important, and so remained until they were self-supporting or self-dependent. With British India, then a mere spot on the peninsula of Hindustan, it was to home and England only that she could look for everything. Until the vast territories along the banks of the Potomac, the Hudson, or the Ohio had been subdued and become populous, only the mother country could be of use to help her struggling Western children in their early youth. To guard the roads by which this necessary help must come was all-important then, as it is now with such of our dependencies as have not grown up to that national manhood which means independence of all maternal support. Hence, then, the natural and instinctive desire to possess the Cape of Good Hope. None saw then that there were other advantages and channels of expansion, besides the Cape itself, to be gained in the “Hinterland” to those unknown but reported “Mountains of the Moon.” It was only as being a port on the road to India, in those days, that made the Cape valuable, and for a very simple reason. Ships, like men, require stores and food. Supplies run short, sails are destroyed, boats swept away. These calling places are to the navy what “the Stores” are to the individual; and if access to such places were denied, the ship and the individual would suffer. A hostile Table Bay or Simon’s Bay would have meant, in those days, no house of call between St. Helena and Bombay!