in preceding centuries. The general peace of the sea is a characteristic feature of me hundred years which followed Trafalgar, and the great product of that long maritime peace is the British Empire. Though its seeds were sown in that long series of maritime wars which closed with Trafalgar, it owes its spontaneous and luxuriant growth to that quietude at sea secured and maintained by the Royal Navy. It is to the prestige and acknowledged power and efficiency of the British fleet that the commerce of the world owes its peaceful progress, our Empire its magnitude, and our Colonies their wonderful development, which in a few score years has changed them from unexplored wildernesses to prosperous, wealthy, and self-governing States. Our Empire to-day is the result of that all-pervading and silent influence of predominant sea-power, which is greatest in effect while dormant, yet ever ready to pounce upon and destroy disturbers of the maritime peace of the people whom it serves.
Now, Trafalgar marked the culminating point of the prestige of the Royal Navy, and nothing has since happened in the world to justify questioning it. The acknowledged power of the fleet is due to sacrifices made by the people of the Mother-land. Beginning with extraordinary and special expenditure for increasing the fleet a few weeks after Trafalgar (though at the moment the power of maritime rivals had been shattered) the sacrifices made ever since to retain that superiority in ships and armaments at sea which the great battle off the coast of Spain incidentally gave us have been immense and continuous. No part of our vast outlying Empire has shared these sacrifices, so the Royal Navy is the navy of the United Kingdom; its prestige is the precious heritage of its people. It was their daring which created it, and their sacrifices alone and unaided which have maintained, and still maintain, its acknowledged strength and power.
The essential condition of the existence of the whole fabric of Empire, the pride and boast of all its citizens, is predominant sea-power, but the burden of maintain-
