Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

much more resembles the progress of the enemy of all improvement. The conqueror moves in a march. He stalks onward with "the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war banners flying, shouts rending the air, guns thundering, and martial music pealing, to drown the 'shrieks of the wounded, and the lamentations for the slain.

Not thus the schoolmaster, in his peaceful vocation. He meditates and prepares in secret the plans which are to bless mankind; he slowly gathers around him those who are to further their execution; he quietly, though firmly, advances in his humble path, labouring steadily, but calmly, till he has opened to the light all the recesses of ignorance, and torn up by the roots the weeds of vice. His is a progress not to be compared with anything like a march; but it leads to a far more brilliant triumph, and to laurels more imperishable than the destroyer of his species, the scourge of the world, ever won.

Such men-men deserving the glorious title of teachers of mankind—I have found, labouring conscientiously, though perhaps obscurely, in their blessed vocation, wherever I have gone. I have found them, and shared their fellowship, among the daring, the ambitious, the ardent, the indomitably active French; I have found them among the 'persevering, resolute, ⚫industrious Swiss; I have found them among the laborious, the warm-hearted, the enthusiastic Germans; I have found them among the high-minded Italians; and in our own country, thank Heaven, they everywhere abound, and their number is every day increasing.

[ocr errors]

Their calling is high and holy; their fame is the property of nations; their renown will fill the Earth in after ages, in proportion as it sounds not far off in their own times. Each one of those great teachers of the world, possessing his soul in patience, performs his appointed work; awaits in faith the fulfilment of the promises; and, resting from his labours, bequeaths his memory to the generation whom his works have blessed, and sleeps under the humble but not inglorious epitaph, 'commemorating one in whom mankind lost a friend, and no man got rid of an enemy." LORD BROUGHAM (1778-1868).

66

[blocks in formation]

BRITISH COLONIAL AND NAVAL POWER. THE 'sagacity of England is in nothing more clearly shown than in the foresight with which she has provided against the 'emergency of war. Let it come when it may, it will not find her unprepared. So thickly are her colonies and naval stations scattered over the face of the Earth, that her war-ships can speedily reach every commercial centre on the globe.

There is that great centre of commerce, the Mediterranean Sea. It was a great centre long ago, when the Phoenician1 traversed it, and, passing through the Pillars of Hercules,2 sped on his way to the distant and then savage Britain. It was a great centre when Rome and Carthage3 wrestled in a deathgrapple for its possession. But at the present day England is as much at home on the Mediterranean as if it were one of her own Canadian lakes.

Nor is it simply the number of the British colonies, or the evenness with which they are distributed, that challenges our 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, but England has a stronghold on its shores. And wherever the continents tending southward come to points, around which the commerce of nations must sweep, there 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 nothing else, but the British flag floats securely over it.

These are literal facts. 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 only. England holds the key to every one of these gates. Count them-Gibraltar, Malta, Aden. But she commands the entrance to the Red Sea, not by one, but by several strongholds. 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 mainland, are the ship-channels which connect the Red Sea with the great Indian Ocean. This England holds.

A little farther out is the peninsula of Aden, another Gibraltar, as rocky, as sterile, and as precipitous, connected with the mainland by a narrow strait, and having a harbour safe in all

[blocks in formation]

winds, and a central coal depôt. This England bought in 1839. And to complete her 'security, she has purchased from some petty sultan the neighbouring islands of Socotra and Kouri, giving, as it were, a retaining fee, so that, though she does not need them herself, no rival power may 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 it by every breeze! The teas of China! The silks of Farther India! The spices of the East! The ships of every clime and nation swarm on its waters! The stately barques of England, France, and Holland! The swift ships of America! And mingled with them, in picturesque confusion, the clumsy junk of the Chinaman, and the slender, darting canoe of the Malaysian islanders.

At the lower end of the China Sea, where it narrows into Malacca Strait, England holds the little island of Singapore—a spot of no use to her whatever, except as a commercial depôt, but of inestimable value for that; a spot which, under her fostering care, is growing up to take its place among the great emporiums of the world. Half way up the sea she holds the island of Labuan,5 whose chief worth is this, that beneath its surface and that of the neighbouring mainland there lie inexhaustible treasures of coal, which are likely to yield wealth and power to the hand that controls them. At the upper end of the sea she holds Hong-Kong, a hot, unhealthy island, but an invaluable base from which to threaten and control the neighbouring waters.

[ocr errors]

Even in the broad, and as yet comparatively untracked Pacific, she is making silent advances towards dominion. The vast continent of Australia, which she has secured, forms its south-western boundary. And pushed out six hundred miles eastward from this lies New Zealand, like a strong outpost, its shores so scooped and torn by the waves that it must be a very paradise of commodious bays and safe havens for the mariner. The soil, too, is of extraordinary fertility; and the climate, though humid, deals kindly with the Englishman's constitution. Nor is this all; for, advanced from it, north and south, like picket stations, are Norfolk Isle, and the Auckland group, both of which have good harbours. And it requires no prophet's eye to see that, when England needs posts farther eastward, she will find them among the green coral islets that stud the Pacific.

Turn now your steps homeward, and pause a moment at the Bermudas, those beautiful isles, with their fresh verdure-green

gems in the ocean, with air soft and balmy as Eden's was! They have their home uses too. They furnish arrow-root for the sick, and ample supplies of vegetables earlier than sterner climates will yield them. Is this all that can be said? Reflect a little more deeply. These islands possess a great military and naval depôt; and a splendid harbour, land-locked, strongly fortified, and difficult of access to strangers;—and all within a few days' sail of the chief ports of the Atlantic shores of the New World. England therefore retains them as a station on the road to her West Indian possessions; and should America go to war with her, she would use it as a base for 'offensive operations, where she might gather and whence she might hurl upon any unprotected port all her gigantic naval and military power. Atlantic Monthly.-(An American Magazine.)

[blocks in formation]

(See p. 272, Note 1.)

Overland Route.-See lesson on this subject, p. 128.

1 The Phoenician.-The Phoenicians | B. C.) In the last, Carthage was destroyed. (natives of Phoenicia, on the sea-coast of Syria) were the most eminent navigators and traders of antiquity. They planted numerous colonies on the shores of the Mediterranean, the chief of which was Carthage, fifteen centuries before the Christian era.

2 Pillars of Her'cules.-The Strait of Gibraltar. (See p. 129.)

3

* Rome and Carthage. They struggled for the mastery of the Mediterranean in the three great Punic Wars (264, 218, 149

[ocr errors]

5 Labuan, a small island in the East Indian Archipelago, on the north-west coast of Borneo.

"Hong-Kong, at the mouth of Canton river, in China. It was taken by the English in 1839, and formally ceded to Britain in 1841.

7 Bermu'das. - See lesson on Great Ocean Routes, p. 210.

QUESTIONS.-How do Britain's colonies strengthen her naval power? On what commanding positions has she strongholds? What are the three gates of the Overland Route? Who holds the keys to them? How does Britain command the China Sea? How the Pacific? What do the Bermudas enable her to control?

[blocks in formation]

KING JOHN invades France, to chastise Philip for espousing the cause of Prince Arthur, the rightful heir to the English throne. In a battle before Angiers, Arthur is taken prisoner. Hubert, chamberlain to King John, is appointed Arthur's keeper, with instructions to find some means of depriving the young prince of life.

SCENE-King John's tent before Angiers.

K. John. Come hither, Hubert. O my gentle Hubert,
We owe thee much;..

Give me thy hand. I had a thing to say,-
But I will fit it with some better time.

In good sooth, Hubert, I am almost ‘ashamed

To say what good respect I have of thee.

Hub. I am much bounden1 to your majesty.

K. John. Good friend, thou hast no cause to say so yet;
But thou shalt have: and creep time ne'er so slow,
Yet it shall come for me to do thee good.

I had a thing to say-but let it go:

The sun is in the heaven, and the proud day,
•Attended with the pleasures of the world,
Is all too wanton, and too full of gawds,2
To give me audience :—If the midnight bell
Did, with his iron tongue and brazen mouth,
Sound one unto the drowsy race of night;
If this same were a churchyard where we stand,
And thou possessed with a thousand wrongs;
Or if that surly spirit, 'melancholy,

Had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick,
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins,
Making that idiot, laughter, keep men's eyes
And strain their cheeks to idle 'merriment,
A passion hateful to my purposes;)

Or if that thou couldst see me without eyes,
Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
Without a tongue, using conceit3 alone,

Without eyes, ears, and harmful sound of words;—

« ForrigeFortsett »