But our most energetic rivals of all have been the Americans, who occupied the Philippines in 1898. That archipelago had previously been occupied for three and a half centuries by the Spaniards. In 1880 the British Cable Company arranged with the Spanish Government to lay a cable from Hong Kong to Cape Bolinao, near Manila, the capital of the Philippines. In 1897 a further step was taken. Immediately to the south of the great island of Luzon lie a number of smaller islands, the chief being Panay, Negros, and Cebu. These islands in that year were connected with the island of Luzon. I remember, when visiting those stations, in the profoundest depths of the Pacific, feeling that here was the utmost boundary and frontier, the ultima Thule, of British private enterprise.
But in 1898 the scene totally changed. For twenty years previous—since the negotiation of the treaty of 1878 with Samoa for an American coaling-station in the Pacific—the United States had been looking, ever more ambitiously, to the Far East. In 1848 she had evicted Spain from the Pacific slope: now she evicted her from the Philippines. Cable communication with the new American Empire was indispensable. Should the State undertake it, or should private persons? Her statesmen decided for private enterprise, and, accordingly, in 1908 the Commercial Pacific Company laid cables from San Francisco to Honolulu, thence to Midway and Guam, and thence again to Manila. The Philippine traffic, which previously had to pass wholly over the British cable to Hong Kong, now round an independent route direct to America. To tap the China traffic, the Americans further laid a cable from Manila to Shanghai.
Last new rival of all, Japan intends, naturally enough, to seek an independent connection in the direction of America, She has already her own cables to Formosa, and thence to Foochow, She is laying a cable to connect herself with Bonin, and thus with America.
Prior to 1890 the China rate was from 7s. 1d. to
