Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/107



Except for a small tribute in the shape of fish food and certain salts the ocean is to-day almost a dead loss to the world, and what is worse, the greatest of all obstacles to progress. It separates us from our kin, wrecks our ships, claims a yearly toll of dead, and is barren, fruitless, a mere receptacle for garbage. A hundred years hence we shall have awakened to these facts and found means to make "the Caverns vast of ocean old" something better than a subject for the poet and a resting-place for the dead whom it murders.

Not every dream, however, can be realised—not even the engineer's. Some years ago certain ardent spirits in France announced that the desert of Sahara lay below the level of the sea and could be flooded with the Atlantic or Mediterranean, The effect of this, it was considered, would not merely be to inconvenience certain Arabs, but to change entirely the climate of the rest of equatorial Africa. Laved by the beneficent waves of ocean, lands at present