h Empire {8} has nearly
half of the whole world's mercantile marine; and the United Kingdom alone
builds more than three-fifths of the world's new tonnage every year.
When all the other elements of sea-power are taken into
consideration--the people who are directly dependent on the sea, the
values constantly afloat, the credits involved, the enormous advantages
enjoyed, and the clinching fact that British naval defeat means disaster
and disaster means ruin--when all this is brought into the reckoning, it
is safe to say that the combined maritime interests of the British Empire
practically equal those of all the rest of the world put together. When
it is also remembered that Canada, itself a land of waterways, contains a
third of the total area of the Empire, and lies between the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans, the significance of these facts is placed beyond a doubt.

Take a very different illustration--the speech of Canada to-day--and the
significance is still the same. We have so many sea terms in our
ordinary English speech that we almost forget that they are sea terms at
all till we compare them with corresponding idioms in other languages.
Then we realize that only the Dutch, the Finns, and the Scandinavians can
{9} approach the English-speaking peoples in the common use of sea terms.
Other foreigners employ different phrasing altogether. Their landsmen
never 'clear the decks for action,' are never 'brought up with a round
turn,' or even 'taken aback,' as if by the wind on the wrong side. They
never have 'three sheets in the wind,' even when they do get 'half seas
over.' They don't 'throw a man overboard,' even when the man is one of
those unfortunates who is apt to get 'on his beam ends.' The facetious
'don't speak to the man at the wheel' and the cautious 'you'd better not
sail so close to the wind' have no exact equivalents for the Slav or
Latin man in the street.

These, and many more, are common expressions which Anglo-Canadians share
with the stay-at-home type of Englishman. But the special point is that,
like the American, the Canadian is still more nautical than the
Englishman in his everyday use of sea terms. 'So long!' in the sense of
good-bye is a seaport valediction commoner in Canada than in England.
Canadians go 'timber-cruising' when they are looking for merchantable
trees; they used to understand what 'prairie schooners' were out West;
and even now they always 'board' a train wherever it may {1