parties were available and the steamer ready to start.''

More significant still are the submarine cables which aggregate
1,751 in number and over 200,000 miles in length and
which annually transmit more than 6,000,000 messages,
annihilating the time and distance which formerly separated
nations. When King William IV of England died in 1837,
the news was thirty-five days in reaching America. But when
Queen Victoria passed away January 22, 1901, at 6:30 P. M.,
the afternoon papers describing the event were being sold in
the streets of New York at 3:30 P. M. of the same day! As I
rose to address a union meeting of the English speaking residents
of Canton, China, on that fateful September day of 1901,
a message was handed me which read, ``President McKinley is
dead.'' So that by means of the submarine cable, that little
company of Englishmen and Americans in far-off China bowed
in grief and prayer simultaneously with multitudes in the home
land.

Not only Europe and America, but Siberia and Australia,
New Zealand and New Caledonia, Korea and the Kameruns,
Laos and Persia are within the sweep of this modern system of
intercommunication. The latest as well as one of the most
important links in this world system is the Commercial
Pacific Cable between Manila and San Francisco.

President Roosevelt gave a significant illustration of the perfection
of this system when, on the completion of the
Commercial Pacific Cable July 4, 1903, he flashed a message
around the earth in twelve minutes, while a second message