Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/108

 uninhabitable would, it was declared, become fertile and salubrious. The project was dismissed or shelved as impracticable from engineering difficulties. Shall we, a hundred years hence, have met these difficulties?

Probably not. To work such changes in the distribution of land and water will be a thing not indeed beyond the power of the next century's engineers, but beyond their daring. The accomplishment of them might, if at all rapid, be attended by frightful disasters, some of which can be readily estimated, but of which the worst would probably remain unforeseen and unimagined until the irrevocable moment of fulfilment. To increase to this extent the area of the world's oceans, without increasing (as of course we could not increase) their mass, would perceptibly lower the level of the sea everywhere, and in accordance with the well-known hydrostatic law things would "right themselves" on a cataclysmal scale. Every narrow strait in the world, every oceanic canal would become, for the time being, a roaring cataract. The Mediterranean would rush tumultuously out through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, and the overflow would flood the adjacent lands. The Straits of Dover would roar like Niagara, and all Kent, and the low-lying north-east corner of France, would be devastated. The isthmus of Panama might at the same time be swept away, for the narrow