Any well-filled album of postage-stamps is an eloquent
commentary on this maritime supremacy of England. It is enough to turn
one's head to look over her colonial blue-books. The natural outcome of
all this overflowing vitality it is not difficult to foresee. No one can
carefully watch what is going on in Africa to-day without recognizing it
as the same sort of thing which was going on in North America in the
seventeenth century; and it cannot fail to bring forth similar results
in course of time. Here is a vast country, rich in beautiful scenery and
in resources of timber and minerals, with a salubrious climate and
fertile soil, with great navigable rivers and inland lakes, which will
not much longer be left in control of tawny lions and long-eared
elephants and negro fetich-worshippers. Already five flourishing English
states have been established in the south, besides the settlements on
the Gold Coast and those at Aden commanding the Red Sea. English
explorers work their way, with infinite hardship, through its
untravelled wilds, and track the courses of the Congo and the Nile as
their forefathers tracked the Potomac and the Hudson. The work of La
Salle and Smith is finding its counterpart in the labours of Baker and
Livingstone. Who can doubt that within two or three centuries the
African continent will be occupied by a mighty nation of English
descent, and covered with populous cities and flourishing farms, with
railroads and telegraphs and other devices of civilization as yet
undreamed of?
If we look next to Australia, we find a country of more than two-thirds
the area of the United States, with a temperate climate and immense
resources, agricultural and mineral,--a country sparsely peopled by a
race of irredeemable savages hardly above the level of brutes.
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