But cross over the Indian Ocean, and thread the tortuous ways of the East Indian Archipelago, and you shall find the beautiful white flag with its red cross flying in the most out-of-the-way nooks among that tremendous maze. Here with never-ceasing labours the highly trained officers of our navy work with loving care to make perfect our geographical knowledge of those intricate current-scoured channels. By reason of this long-drawn-out toil our merchant ships are enabled to pursue their peaceful way with perfectly trustworthy charts to guide them. Not only so, but, owing to the dauntless courage, energy, and perseverance of these nameless seafarers, those tortuous waters have been cleansed of the human tigers that had for so long infested them, swooping down upon hapless merchantmen of all nations, pitiless and insatiable as death itself. Within the lifetime of men of middle age those seas were like a hornet’s nest. In every creek, estuary, and channel lurked Portuguese, Malay, and Chinese pirates, the terror of the Eastern seas. Now, solely through the exertions of our countrymen, or by their good example putting heart into the Chinese sailors, those waters are as safe as the English Channel. So, too, have the coasts of China itself been purged of pirates, although there, since every Chinese, of whatever grade, is a potential pirate or brigand given the opportunity, immunity from piratical raids is only purchased at the price of incessant vigilance. In the far Eastern seas, however, our stalwart fighting sailors are more than mere keepers of the peace of Britain, they stand between the crumbling Celestial Empire and the greed of the world.[B] Ever ready in diplomacy as in war, and with a force always sufficient to command respect as well as breed envy, they make the might of our island nation felt in all the affairs of the Far East.
[B] This sentence was written before the recent outbreak of hostilities in China.
Cross the Pacific, and on the western sea-board of our vast American possessions find a naval station fully equipped for the maintenance of a fleet so far from home. From thence the peace-keepers sally forth all over the length and breadth of Northern Oceania and all down the western littoral of the great American continent, a mobile body of peace-keepers, whose business it is to keep widely opened eyes upon all the doings of other people, no matter how great or how small they may be. Hailed with delight by dusky populations, who hate impartially the Germans and the French, and look upon the war-canoes of the great white Queen of Belitani as the adjusters of disputes and the even-handed dispensers of justice between them, dreaded by the rascaldom of the Pacific; the robbers of men’s bodies as well as the robbers of their produce, truly the lads under the White Ensign have a wide field in the “peaceful” ocean for their beneficent labours. Guarding that Greater England in the Southern seas, where men of every nation under heaven find the same security, the same opportunities to grow rich that men of our own race enjoy, clustering closely around that storm-centre (in a double sense), the Cape Colony, patrolling Western Africa, as well as Eastern, and ready at a word to send off a compact little army into the interior, mobile and manageable as no shore troops can ever be; among West Indian islands, as warm and fruitful as the most northerly American station is cold and arid, the great patrol goes on.