Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/139

 in the human brotherhood, which before had seemed to sunder mankind, seemed now, on the contrary, rather the piquant bond of a closer union, International fetes, and other occasions of international meeting and greeting, were everywhere given and reciprocated.

One of the most striking of these, at this auspicious time, was between England and America, in the way of bridging the intermediate Atlantic. The great ocean was thenceforth to be reduced to a mere ferry, and the ferry-boats to resemble swift-travelling cities or districts, whose citizens of passage were to be hardly conscious en route that they had ever quitted terra firma. In realizing this idea there was a memorable race on either side to construct the first boat, and accomplish the first voyage of this new international visiting. But ever as the swift messages to either side told that one of the rivals was in advance of the other, a fresh relay was put on to restore the pace, each in this way falling back upon practically unlimited resource. The vain contest was therefore changed to an amicable agreement that each should finish at the same moment, as well as, at one and the same signal, start upon their respective voyage, each meeting the other in the mid-Atlantic. Fifty thousand passengers sailed simultaneously from either shore, and the accurate precision with which they met as arranged was not less satisfactory, as a scientific attainment, than the cordiality of the novel mid-ocean greeting. But these first boats of the great Atlantic ferry, which astonished their own generation, were in turn quite dwarfed by subsequent achievements of the like kind, when the twenty-first