Aden, India, in geographical succession though not in strict order of time, show a completed chain; forged link by link, by open force or politic bargain, but always resulting from the steady pressure of a national instinct, so powerful and so accurate that statesmen of every school, willing or unwilling, have found themselves carried along by a tendency which no individuality can resist or greatly modify.  Both unsubstantial rumor and incautious personal utterance have suggested an impatient desire in Mr. Gladstone to be rid of the occupation of Egypt; but scarcely has his long exclusion from office ended when the irony of events signalizes his return thereto by an increase in the force of occupation.  Further, it may be noted profitably of the chain just cited, that the two extremities were first possessed—­first India, then Gibraltar, far later Malta, Aden, Cyprus, Egypt—­and that, with scarce an exception, each step has been taken despite the jealous vexation of a rival.  Spain has never ceased angrily to bewail Gibraltar.  “I had rather see the English on the heights of Montmartre,” said the first Napoleon, “than in Malta.”  The feelings of France about Egypt are matter of common knowledge, not even dissembled; and, for our warning be it added, her annoyance is increased by the bitter sense of opportunity rejected.

It is needless here to do more than refer to that other chain of maritime possessions—­Halifax, Bermuda, Santa Lucia, Jamaica—­which strengthen the British hold upon the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Isthmus of Panama.  In the Pacific the position is for them much less satisfactory—­nowhere, perhaps, is it less so, and from obvious natural causes.  The commercial development of the eastern Pacific has been far later, and still is less complete, than that of its western shores.  The latter when first opened to European adventure were already the seat of ancient economies in China and Japan, furnishing abundance of curious and luxurious products to tempt the trader by good hopes of profit.  The western coast of America, for the most part peopled by savages, offered little save the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru, and these were monopolized jealously by the Spaniards—­not a commercial nation—­during their long ascendency.  Being so very far from England and affording so little material for trade, Pacific America did not draw the enterprise of a country the chief and honorable inducement of whose seamen was the hope of gain, in pursuit of which they settled and annexed point after point in the regions where they penetrated, and upon the routes leading thither.  The western coasts of North America, being reached only by the long and perilous voyage around Cape Horn, or by a more toilsome and dangerous passage across the continent, remained among the last of the temperate productive seaboards of the earth to be possessed by white men.  The United States were already a nation, in fact as well as in form, when Vancouver was exploring