Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/808

730 's illustration, to girdle the earth eleven times at the equator, or more than sufficient to reach from the earth to the moon. The continental lines of railways are made virtually continuous round the world by connecting lines of ocean steamers. Telegraph wires traverse the continents in all directions, and sables run beneath all the oceans of the globe.

By these inventions the most remote parts of the earth have been brought near together. A solidarity of commercial interests has been created. Thought has been made virtually omnipresent: a new and helpful idea or discovery becomes immediately the common possession of the world. Facilities for travel, by bringing men together, and familiarizing them with new scenes and different forms of society and belief, have made them more liberal and tolerant. Mind has been broadened and quickened. And by the virtual annihilation of time and space, governmental problems have been solved. The chief difficulties in maintaining a confederation of states widely separated have been removed, and such extended territories as those of the United States made practically as compact as the most closely consolidated European state. England, with her scattered colonies, may now, Professor Seeley thinks, well enough become a World-Venice, with the oceans for streets. Furthermore, the steps of human progress have been accelerated a hundred-fold. The work of years, and of centuries even, is crowded into a day. Thus Japan, on the outskirts of the world, has been modified more by our civilization within the last decade or two, than Britain was modified by the civilization of Rome during the four hundred years that the island was connected with the empire.

But a still more important feature of the new epoch is the use of steam engines, electric motors, and machinery in the manufactures and the various other industries of mankind. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the great manufactures of the world were in their infancy. Under the impulse of modern inventions they have been carried to seeming perfection at a bound. New motors and improved machinery have increased incalculably