LINKS OF EMPIRE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 91, 19 April 1911, Page 2

LINKS OF EMPIRE.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE KING'S DOMINIONS. FOURTEEN YEARS' PROGRESS. How great have been the efforts made to bring the outposts of the Empire into touch with the Home Government is shown by an inspection of the list j of addresses to which Queen Victoria's gracious Diamond Jubilee message was despatched in 1897, remarks the London TJaily Telegraph. There- were then many servants of the State engaged in watching over the progress of newly-acquired colonial possessions of the Crown and British Protectorates, to whom the deepsea cables could not speak. Although not within telegraphic call of Home, these colonisers received Her Majesty's good wishes with the least possible delay, some of the messages going forward in postbags carried by runners into the heart of what were then black men]s countries, and others travelling in small boats across stormy seas. Fourteen years have wrought a wondrous change, and if the King wished to follow the precedent eet by Queen Victoria, to send a message to all his peoples, the only officials of His Majesty's dominions who would not receive a telegram ovei the cable and inland wire would be : The Governor, Falkland Islands. The Governor, New Guinea. Tho telegram to the former would be sent, as in 1897, to Monte' Video, for despatch by the next steamer to the most southerly of the -British dominions, and the message to British New Guinea would go to Australia for, transmission over many hundreds of miles of land lines, until it reached the station at Thursday Island, from which point a steamer would carry it to Port Moresby. In 1897 the post had to be utilised tc- carry the messages to the following places, in addition to the Falkland Islands and New Guinea : St. Helena (post from Teneriffe). Fiji Islands (post from Sydney). Central Africa (post from Mozambique). Uganda (post from Zanzibar). Belize, British Honduras (post from New Orleans). WIRES IN AFRICA. Since Queen Victoria's reign more than 160,000 square miles has been added to the dominions of the Crown in South Africa alone, where his Majesty's subjects now number over five millions, nearly four-fifths of whom belong to coloured races. Africa shows the greatest advance of all the colonies in facilities for rapid communication. Instead of sending the message from Mozambique through the low country to Blantyre, a telegram to the Governor of the Nya«6aland Protectorate in Central Africa would now go to Zomba or Blantyre over the inland Cape-to-Cairo line, via Salisbury, in Rhodesia. In, the Ea6t Africa Protectorate a telegram will reach Nairobi, via Mombasa, in a very short epace of time, and the Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Uganda would get a message in the uplands at Entebbe practically at tho ' same moment. From Mombasa a triple telegraph line runs along the railway lo the railhead at the Victoria Njanza, but wblb eteam traction stops 'at the lake a wire' is carried on in a north-westerly direction, to Wadelai, on the Nile. Here -it stops for the present, ¦ but when the civilising pioneers are able to overcome the difficulties presented by the r deep swamps between Wadelai and Gondokoro, the southern end of the j line from Cairo, th© lines will be joined and communication overland from Mombasa to Cairo will be possible. The section ' from the Cape liae iie temporary terminus at Ujiji, in German East Africa,, 3250 miles from Capetown, but by-and-by a junction is to be effected in L'ganda, and when the section between Wadelai and Gondokoro is completed, the north and south of the continent will be within call. This colossal achievement would make eaey the distribution of a Coronation message to the various Governors, and, through them, to Hifi Majesty's subjects, celebrating a great British event in the interior far away from any civilisation save that which they have effected. EMPIRE SENTINELS. Nowadays the little Admiralty station at Ascension, and the garrisonless post at St. Helena, are- in direct call with London through St. Vincent. It was not co in 1897, but -the new Eastern Telegraph Company's cable, completed to Capetown in 1899." takes these solitary islands by the way. East of Africa, Mauritius has been connected up with home through Durban since 1901, and at the Seychelles Islands, a separate colony since 1903, there ie a cable station. The cable 'runs almost due east from Mauritius to the Cocoe Islands, an isolated group in the Indian Ocean, through which messages for Australia proceed. Here wireless apparatus has recently bsen installed, enabling communication to be effected within a radius of 200 miles with chips running between. Colombo and West Australian ports. Out in the Pacific another cable has picked up a British possession since the Diamond Jubilee. Tne Governor of the Fiji Islands and High Commissioner of the Western, Pacific is now brought within call of Whitehall by the Pacific cable station at Suva, which proceeds south to Norfolk Maud and Brisbane. The last of the colonies to be linked up wae British Honduras, and instead of messages having to be sent- by mail steamer across the Gulf of Mexico from New Orleans, they are- despatched from the Mexican town of Frontera over a land line to Belize, the capital of the colony. While we have been endeavouring to annimlate distance by linking up the Empire with new cables and thousands of leagues of land lines, we have been equally successful in saving time. The newer cables have copper conductors of larger capacity than, the older types, and telegrams are now transmitted at much higher speeds than wLen the Diamond Jubilee message was flashed round the globe.