England will have to foster the welfare of her possessions in these regions as she has never done before. The Brussels Convention forbade her to give any preference to sugar produced in her own dominions. But she is about to step out of that agreement, and will be at liberty, if she thinks fit, to encourage by preferential favours the one great staple for which these colonies can find no substitute. There may be differences of opinion on the fiscal question, but surely everybody must agree that the naval power and political prestige of the British Empire must be represented in the Caribbean Sea by something rather more impressive than two small and obsolete cruisers. If England is to maintain her position against the severer competition she will now have to face, if she is to get her share of the new commerce now in prospect, she will have to give her traders, and shippers, and merchants all the confidence and encouragement which her flag should inspire. One or two well-equipped naval bases, a squadron of up-to-date cruisers for police and patrol work in the Caribbean and down the Pacific coasts of America, are indispensable. There must be no more earthquakes and destructions of British cities with never a British vessel to bring the sorely-needed help, no more riots in British islands with only a Dutch warship standing helplessly by. Both British Columbia and the West Indies have complained with reason of the absenteeism of the British fleet from their shores. The necessity for concentrating all our naval power in the North Sea to meet the German menace has no doubt been the cause of these withdrawals from the outer sea-marches of the empire. But at any cost this wrong will have to be righted in the future. The West Indies and British Columbia are just the two portions of the empire which the Panama Canal may benefit most and most immediately, and they have a right to expect the support and co-operation of the imperial government wherever it can be given. All the Powers of the world will be afloat on the Caribbean and along the Pacific sea-trails to Balboa. Let the white ensign return to these seas and shores as an earnest to all that the same national spirit that won for England her political and commercial supremacy avails to maintain it now and in the new era which is just dawning. FOOTNOTES: [21] From the already-quoted paper read before the Royal Colonial Institute, March 19, 1912. [22] Marco Polo, following Aristotle's nomenclature, had given the name of "Antilla" to an island off the eastern coast of Asia. The name was transferred by Columbus, or Peter Martyr, to the islands of the Caribbean. CHAPTER XIX. THE NEW PACIFIC.