Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/138

126 can any man bring himself to believe that any reliance can be placed on them in such crises as those to which all modern social tendencies are pointing, or deem them comparable to written provisions checking, limiting, and delaying the successes of political zealots ?

The main theme of the Contemporary Review is the character and influence of the prince-consort, and we think it abundantly proved that we are at present living under a political system of his invention. The system has been much impaired since his death through the widowhood and voluntary seclusion of the queen. But Prince Albert was the first to gather up the scattered fragments of power and influence which George and William had left, and to use them freely but we must own rather intelligently than wisely. The true moral of the history of this remarkable man is not, however, suggested by the writer before us. We see no advantage in keeping back a set of facts which biographers and their critics slur over, but which were once well known. The prince-consort was not always popular in England. One part of English society disliked him for his accomplishments and his rather ostentatious indifference to its favourite pursuits; that very powerful portion of it which is called the religious world detested him for his theological liberalism; and the multitude scoffed at his alleged parsimony and distrusted him as a foreigner. Amid all this, there is no doubt that he was a very able, very upright, and very cultivated man, with no very deep insight into English politics, and not a few delusions (as it has turned out) about the politics of the Continent. We think, however, it is clear that in a more democratic state of society he would have been a great danger; and that one of the very best men ever associated with English royalty might, half a century later, have been made the pretext for one of those violent outbreaks against existing institutions which, in older English history, had their excuse in the supposed noxious influence of a favourite near the throne.

 

 From The Spectator.

all admire M. de Lesseps, and all hope that some one as energetic, though perhaps less fluent, will obtain an equal success in the attack on the Isthmus of Panama; but just think for a moment — there being no politics stirring, no scandal afloat, and no German victory quite imminent — what a world we could make of it if we could really interfere with geography, could, by any development of energy, or science, or human controlling volition over matter, alter at all seriously the natural features of the earth! It is interesting, if useless, to dream sometimes, and the magnitude of the results which very slight geographical changes would effect — changes smaller, most of them, than the rise of Santorin, or the subsidence of the Runn of Cutch, or the drying-up of the Baltic, or the upheaval of the great Steppe, or many another process men of science believe to be going on — tempts day-dreamers to their enjoyment. Suppose a competent politician, who was also a philanthropist large-minded enough to weigh the permanent welfare of humanity against the loss of a few lives, to be invested with such power, and think what he might accomplish. Northern Asia, now the most inaccessible of all the temperate regions, a mighty tract almost useless to civilized man, a tract larger than Western Europe and possessed of all climates, would instantly be accessible, for the valley of the Amour, subsiding from the source of the river to within three miles of its mouth for five hundred feet, would become a mighty lake, ten miles wide and two thousand miles long, giving admittance to the fleets of the world into the heart of secluded Asia. The Brahmapootra would become an Amazon, cleaving open the unknown regions between Bengal and Western China, and pouring not into the sea, but into a mighty fiord sixty miles wide, which should replace the swampy, unhealthy Terai of the Himalayas, and turning India into an island, would terminate forever the dangers of invasion from the north, and multiply twenty-fold the points of contact between the great peninsula and European civilization. Far away to the south, Central Australia, depressed for a few hundred feet, would return to the appearance it once must have borne, and the useless solidity of a continent too new for culture, with its rivers wasting themselves in sand from inability to run up-hill to the sea, be exchanged for a Mediterranean surrounded by a belt of splendid colonies, all accessible by water on both sides. Far to the north-west — we are speaking now as if from Calcutta — the junction of the Black Sea and the 