De Profundis by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

So long as the oceans are the ligaments which bind together the great / broad-cast British Empire, so long will there be a dash of romance in / our minds. For the soul is swayed by the waters, as the waters are by / the moon, and when the great highways of an empire are along such roads / as these, so full of strange sights and sounds, with danger ever running / like a hedge on either side of the course, it is a dull mind indeed / which does not bear away with it some trace of such a passage. And / now, Britain lies far beyond herself, for the three-mile limit of every / seaboard is her frontier, which has been won by hammer and loom and pick / rather than by arts of war. For it is written in history that neither / king nor army can bar the path to the man who having twopence in his / strong box, and knowing well where he can turn it to threepence, sets / his mind to that one end. And as the frontier has broadened, the mind of / Britain has broadened too, spreading out until all men can see that the / ways of the island are continental, even as those of the Continent are / insular.

But for this a price must be paid, and the price is a grievous one. As / the beast of old must have one young human life as a tribute every year, / so to our Empire we throw from day to day the pick and flower of our / youth. The engine is world-wide and strong, but the only fuel that will / drive it is the lives of British men. Thus it is that in the grey old / cathedrals, as we look round upon the brasses on the walls, we see / strange names, such names as they who reared those walls had never / heard, for it is in Peshawar, and Umballah, and Korti and Fort Pearson / that the youngsters die, leaving only a precedent and a brass behind / them. But if every man had his obelisk, even where he lay, then no / frontier line need be drawn, for a cordon of British graves would ever / show how high the Anglo-Celtic tide had lapped.