lay in her statesmanship. While the British Government is busy in competing with its own citizens, who in reality are fighting our battles in the Far East, Germany steps forward with a guarantee of traffic for the German-Dutch line of £76,250 a year, and persuades Holland to add another guarantee of £18,750 a year, making a total of £95,000 a year. I do not know whether those 'publicists' and 'Imperial thinkers,' of whom we have so many at home, realize that in urging our Government to lay cables against its own citizens they are, unconsciously no doubt, merely echoing the policy most desired at Berlin. For, clearly, every stroke at British enterprise, whether in the Atlantic or the Pacific, accrues to the profit of the Fatherland.
The next nation which cast eyes across the Pacific was France. The foundations of her Far Eastern Empire were laid in the eighteenth century. In the middle of that century we had evicted her from India after a struggle of a hundred years. Now she was determined to recoup that loss, and to find her Indies in the Far East. So, in 1787, Louis XVI. tried, by treaty, to acquire the protectorate of Cochin-China, and in 1789 a French army, commanded by a Bishop, invaded that country. After a struggle of another hundred years, the Franco-Chinese treaty of 1885 ratified her in possession. In the preceding year, to strengthen her strategy, she had procured a cable from Tonquin to Saigon; but from Saigon homewards the communications of her new Empire rested wholly in the hands of her old rival, England.
In order to remedy this danger, she built a cable from Tourane, in 1901, to Amoy, her policy being to proceed thence northwards and join hands with Russia. But this action was stopped by China, whose rights it infringed, and accordingly she now is turning her attention, eastward across the Pacific. Her plan is to lay a cable from Indo-China to the Dutch Indies, and so home viâ the German-Dutch and American cables to America and France.
