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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 it by every breeze!  The teas of China!  The silks of farther India!  The spices of the East!  What ships of every clime and nation swarm on its waters!  The stately barks of England, France, and Holland!  Our own swift ships!  And mingled with them, in picturesque confusion, the clumsy junk of the Chinaman, the Malay prahu and the slender, darting bangkong of the Sea Dyak!  Has England neglected to secure on a permanent basis her mercantile interests in the Chinese Sea?  At the lower end of that sea, where it narrows and bends into Malacca