ment should buy up British cables and manage them itself. But, obviously, if the main route were State-owned by us, foreign nations would seek their own connections, to the detriment of the British capital sunk in all these subsidiary cables, and to the detriment also of the important influence indirectly entrusted to us under the present system. Indeed, the talk and writing in this strain indulged in occasionally here has already had a bad effect abroad. Germany, becoming anxious for an independent connection, has established a land-line route to Kustendji on the Black Sea, and has laid a cable thence to Constantinople. From Constantinople she has planned a route across Turkey in Asia to the Persian Gulf, and so on to the East. Similarly, France has contemplated a line from Marseilles to Jaffa in Syria, thence to the Gulf of Akabah, and so down the Red Sea to Madagascar southwards, and Cochin-China in the East. 'We wish to say,' said the Cable Committee of 1902, 'that we are strongly opposed to any scheme for the general purchase of private cables by the State.… No serious attempt has been made to prove that submarine cables would be more efficiently managed by the State than by private companies, and we ourselves are decidedly of a contrary opinion. Many of the cables touch on foreign territory, and it is evident that serious difficulty might arise if the British Government endeavoured to work them by its own operators.'[1]
Nevertheless, the same Committee felt it to be its duty to add that the cable communications between Britain and India are not strategically satisfactory, as long as a cable is not laid by the Eastern Telegraph Company from Southern India to Cocos, a British island south of India. From Cocos a cable runs to Australia in one direction, and to South Africa in the other. Thanks to these all-British routes, India would escape being cut off if both the European land-lines and the cables in the Mediterranean were cut.
It should, however, be added that India is already
- ↑ Second Report, paragraphs 96 and 98.
