PATER'S CHATS WITH IKE BOYS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2355, 13 April 1899, Page 58

PATER'S CHATS WITH IKE BOYS.

FIFTY YEARS OF TELEGRAPHY. We have had several references, during Jhe last week or two, to the advance, jnent made ,in wireless telegraphy ; but as the Witness pointed out last week, the subject is not a new one. In the London Daily News of February 18, there . is an account of an interview with Mr Preece, ingineer-in-chief and electrician to the post office, in which he is reported in effect to have said: "As a matter of fact, wireless telegraphy is as old as telegraphy itself, and a system of my own is now in actual use by the post office and the War department, working on a different principle from, Marconi's ; but be" sure that wireless telegraphy will nevei effect a revolution. The message can be caught a hundred times if there are receivers , enough j so, for one thing, . there cannot be much privacy. It ■will be admirable for use on the high seas, ■and for military purposes particularly. But in London, for instance, and towns, wireless telegraphy is impossible." It may be 'berne in mind, however, that men with a special knowledge of a subject as Mr iPreeco have before now found the alleged impossible to be the possible, and that with childish ease. Telegraphy is probably yet in its infancy, for, be it remembered, the pioneer line was constructed in the year our Queen ascended the throne, and that line was only a mile and a-half long! The* strides made in telegraphic communication may be faintly imagined when I tell you that there are over a million miles of lines in use in connection with the British Empire, nearly 200,000 of which are submarine ! In St. Martin's-le-Grand, the world's nerve centre, there are operators literally by the thousand, and by the use of repeaters as many as 12 messages, aggregating 600 words or more a minute, are sent along the same wire. An American is now engaged in perfecting a machine by which an operator sending a message will simply sit down to a machine, type-write the message, and by the same act send it off, and the message will typewrite itself at the receiving office! Impossible? Nothing is impossible nowadays. Then we have the telephone devoloping itself.. Already we are telephoning across a Continent — America ; and Mr Pieece is anticipating that the telautograph and the electrical type-writer will record the fleeting messages as spoken. Last year over 83 millions of telegraph messages were despatched from offices in the United Kingdom, and about six million conversations were carried on by telephone. Rather an advance from the time when single messages were sent over a mile and a-half! THE GROWTH OF THE EMPIRE. "We are in for this great Empire, and there is an end to the matter," is what Sir Robert Giffen, the prince of statisticians, said the other day in London. Sir Robert, to far as prepossessions incline him, is a Little Englander, but he recognises that there is no choice. The British adventurer and trader go forth " and settle on the skirts of civilisation, and British rule follows. And here note what I have drawn your attention to before : with France and Geimany officials precede the trader and settler — with us officialdom comes after Lionel Deqle, a brilliant French traveller, in " Three Years in Savage Africa," is struck with the freedom from burdensome duties and of red tape in British colonies, and as a contrast refers to a caricature on French colonies which made its appearance somewhere -when France annexed Madagascar. The cartoon shows some Hovas looking through telescopes at a large fleet approaching the coast. " They are coming ! They are coming ! " exclaim' the crowd. "Who?" ask the by-standere. "The colonists? ' <r No, the officials," was the reply "And this is a fact," says Decle. "The end and aim of the French Government appears- to be, not the development of trade, but the filling up of the country as soon as possible with useless officials."

But to return. Giffen sees that colonisation is inborn in the British nation, and we giare^ aa an outcome of this characteristic*

arrived at a critical point in our history as a nation, when to half between two opinions means disaster to the Empire. Supposing we were in the humour to stop the onward march, to get rid of our inevitable responsibilities would make so great an alteration in our position in the world that our freedom and independence would be endangered. We must look forward, and make the best of oar burdens. Sir Robert gives a series of statistical tables showing the expansion in territory and commerce since 1871, The Empire has increased one-third, the area being now 11,500,000 square miles, with a population of 420,000.000 — about one-fourth of the "whole population of the earth. In India alone, the increase, partly by. territorial expansion, but mainly by natural increase, has been 73,000,000. These years have seen the rise of a South African Empire which promises to be a second India; and the Nile in North Africa bids fair to become a second Ganges in population and industry. In concluding his paper the lecturer said, "Whether we looked at the varying developments in the purely English parts of the Empire, the magnitude of the growth at Home, the increase at a greater rate in North America, or the increase at a still greater rate in Australasia; or at such a phenomenon as the rapid development of South Africa, where the white races are in actual association with the subject races ; or -at the vast growth of India ; or at the beginning of a new empire in Africa;, to which may be added the latest developments of all in the Klondyke — we found ourselves in -possession of an empire in which a great deal was happening, and with which the fortunes of the human race itself were very largely concerned. . . . It was ai> education of itself to belong to such an Empire, and to help, in however small a degree, in carrying out the common work. ... In former times we held our colonial empire with no other rival than France, now in a position of inferiority with what it was ; but we have now three other Powers — Germanj, Russia, and the United States, to reckon with. For the present a coalition of Powers against us is not probable, their interests being so entirely different, and excepting perhaps Germany, they have a large amount of internal organisation to undertake. The colonial empire of France is almost entirely undeveloped ; Russia has an enormous amount of work to do to fill up decently the huge vacant places within its ringed fence ; and the United States are just beginning theii colonial policy, and have a serious work before them to adapt their Constitution to the new conditions imposed by such a policy. Still, the condition of our Empire, looking at the existence of all these Powers, was seriously different from what it had been, and the next two or three generations would have much to' do in adjusting our relations with co-ordi-nate Powers. . . . On all sides, then, on Litle Englanders as well as Great Englanders, the main idea of policy should now be to knit the different parts of the Empire together, so that they should support each other and support the whole. There must be a common scheme of defence ; there must be a provision of adequate force in each part of the Empire according to that scheme ; and communication must be rapidly improved." I should like you to read the article in full, as given in the London Times of February 15, or the leader in the Daily News of the same date ; but as most of you will not have the opportunity or privilege of doing so, I have done my best to give you a broad conception of Sir Robert's purpose in delivering the lecture, though 1 have avoided his statistics.