THE _ROYAL WILLIAM_. Canadian built; the first boat to
cross any ocean steaming the whole way (1833), the first steamer in the
world to fire a shot in action (May 5, 1836).]

In 1854 French and British were again allied, this time against Russia,
which wanted to cut Europe off from Asia by taking Constantinople. The
Allies took Sebastopol in the Crimea because it was the Russian naval
base in the Black Sea. The Czar never thought that "bleeding his big
toe" could beat him. But it did. He had to supply his army by land,
while the Allies supplied theirs by sea; and though theirs fought
thousands of miles from their bases at home, while his fought in Russia
itself, within a few hundred miles of its bases inland, yet their
sea-power wore out his land-power in less than two years.

Russia was at that time a great world-power, stretching without a break
from the Baltic to Alaska, which she owned. What, then, kept Canada
free from the slightest touch of war? The only answer is, the Royal
Navy, that Navy which, supported by the Mother Country alone, enabled
all the oversea Dominions to grow in perfect peace and safety for this
whole hundred years of British wars. Moreover, Canada was then, and
long remained, one of the greatest shipping countries in the world,
dependent on her own and the Mother Country's shipping for her very
life. What made her shipping safe on every sea? The Royal Navy. But,
more than even this, the Mother Country spent twenty-five hundred
millions of her own money on keeping Canada Canadian and British by
land and sea. And here, again, nothing could have been done without
the Navy.

The Navy enabled the Mother Country to put down the Indian Mutiny, a
mutiny which, if it had succeeded, would have thrown India back a
thousand years, into the welter of her age-long wars; and these wars
themselves would soon have snuffed out all the "Pacifist" Indian
Nationalists who bite the British hand that feeds them, though they
want Britain to do all the paying and fighting of Indian defence. The
Navy enabled the Mother Country to save Egypt from ruin at home, from
the ruthless sword of the Mahdi in the Soudan, and from conquest by the
Germans or the Turks. The Navy also enabled the Mother Country to
change a dozen savage lands into places where people could rise above
the level of their former savage lives.

All this meant war. But if these countries had not been brought into
the British Empire they c