Page:Great Britain and the Suez Canal.djvu/15

 Nuremberg, had been; and she was much more. But the decline of the Ottoman Empire, followed by the construction of the Suez Canal and of the Alpine tunnels, has reopened the old path of commerce. The cities of the Mediterranean are reviving. The Mediterranean States have gained much and we have lost something, even in the last few years; and as time goes on they will continue to gain and we to lose. Any one who visited, as I did, the cities of Southern Europe forty years ago, then cities of the dead, would hardly recognise them now—all bustle, activity, and progress. But we must not forget that political freedom has had as much effect as the return of Eastern commerce in the renewal of their prosperity.

The English merchant is not so selfish as to complain of a change which has benefited the producers and consumers of the world. Instead of sitting down with his hands before him, bemoaning his hard fate or living upon a reduced trade, he has, as I shall indicate later on, found out new trades, if not so profitable to individuals even more beneficial to mankind than those which he has lost.

We shall be told, perhaps, to look at the immense increase in the mercantile marine of England. That increase has really had quite other causes. The invention of the compound steam-engine, which effected an enormous saving of fuel, took place shortly before the opening of the Suez Canal. One leaf out of the experience of our own firm will serve to exemplify how completely the carrying trade of the world was transformed by this invention. A few years before the opening of the Suez Canal we built and fitted with the new compound engines a steamer intended for the Alexandria trade. On her first voyage we found that, with a consumption of fuel less by one-third, she carried five hundred tons more of cargo than a steamer previously built for the same trade. Such an economy of fuel in proportion to cargo at once pointed to a revolution in the carrying trade. It meant that in future all valuable cargoes, at least, would be carried in iron steamers, not, as formerly, in wooden sailing ships.

Since the abolition of the Navigation Laws no shipowners in the world have been more energetic or enterprising than the British. Great Britain is the greatest iron shipbuilding yard, and also the most active machine-shop, in the world. London is the world's financial capital. To a vigorous use of these advantages, and not to the construction of the Suez Canal, this country owes the unrivalled