quite as easily as we could.

* * * * *

But it is not simply the number of the British colonies, or the evenness
with which they are distributed, that challenges our highest admiration.
The positions which these colonies occupy, and their natural military
strength, are quite as important facts. There is not a sea or a gulf in
the world, which has any real commercial importance, that England has not
a stronghold in the throat of it. And wherever the continents trending
southward come to points around which the commerce of nations, must sweep,
there, upon every one of them, is a British settlement, and the cross of
St. George salutes you as you are wafted by. There is hardly a little
desolate, rocky island or peninsula, formed apparently by Nature for a
fortress, and formed for nothing else, but the British lion has it secure
beneath his paw.

This is literal fact. Take, for example, the great overland route from
Europe to Asia. Despite its name, its real highway is on the waters of the
Mediterranean and Red Seas. It has three gates,--three alone. They are the
narrow strait of Gibraltar, fifteen miles wide, that place where the
Mediterranean narrows between Sicily and Africa to less than a hundred
miles wide, and the strait of Bab-el-mandeb, seventeen miles wide. England
holds the keys to every one of these gates. Count them,--Gibraltar, Malta,
and at the mouth of the Red Sea, not one, but many keys. There, midway in
the narrow strait, is the black, bare rock of Perim, sterile, precipitous,
a perfect counterpart of Gibraltar; and on either side, between it and the
main-land, are the ship-channels which connect the Red Sea with the great
Indian Ocean. This England seized in 1857. A little farther out is the
peninsula of Aden, another Gibraltar, as rocky, as sterile, as
precipitous, connected with the mainland by a narrow strait, and having at
its base a populous little town, a harbor safe in all winds, and a central
coal-depot. This England bought, after her fashion of buying, in 1839. And
to complete her security, we are now told that she has purchased of some
petty Sultan the neighboring islands of Socotra and Kouri, giving, as it
were, a retaining-fee, that, though she does not need them herself, no
rival power shall ever possess them.

As we sail a little farther on, we come to the Chinese Sea. What a beaten
track of commerce is this! What wealth of comfort and luxury is wafted
over