Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/139

Rh Caspian, of which the Russian czars and their German engineers are dreaming, would be effected on a scale — say, a channel thirty miles wide — which would bring Persia, South-Eastern Russia, and the Turkoman Steppes within easy sail of the Mediterranean, and therefore of all the influences of the modern world. The Volga, tripled in volume, would be open to ships instead of boats, and the maritime passes of Asia, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, widened to thirty miles by a subsidence of their borders, would let out Russia freely to the outer world, terminate the hunger of St. Petersburg for Constantinople, shift the Russian centre of gravity to Perekop, and make of sixty millions of semi-Asiatics Europeans. Careless of all patriotisms except the planetary one, our philanthropist would strike a second blow for Russia, and submerging Lapland, and restoring the Scandinavian peninsula to its old position as an island, place the eastern half of Europe in direct and constant relation with the Atlantic. It is water-communication which now, in the popular belief, civilizes nations, whether it be by insuring collision of ideas, or, as a recent German philosopher maintains in the teeth of facts, by arousing the enery of islanders, who, isolated on all sides by the sea, must strive strenuously or perish. He was thinking of Englishmen when he laid down that doctrine, and forgot, as European philosophers so constantly forget, that the Tasmanian enjoyed all the physical conditions to which our ancestors were subjected, and did not become energetic at all, but passed out of existence, useful, to human eyes, only because the grass grew richer above his grave. We need not, however, mind that in a day-dream.

Turning to Africa, the Northern Desert, the boundless Sahara, would subside again till a smaller Mediterranean made the coast-belt valuable, and Central Africa accessible; while another deep and broad fiord stretching from sea to sea in the twenty-eighth parallel of south latitude, would make of the South-African Dominion a huge island, fit for the abode of an English-speaking people, who, so placed, might multiply as if they were in North America. Neither the tsetse-fly nor the Zulu savage can cross salt-water. In North America, again, three more deep lakes, as large as Lake Superior, with connecting rivers, would carry on the chain of internal navigation from the Atlantic to the North Pacific; while the subsidence of the Isthmus of Panama for its whole length would open what ought to be, and in some slow, imperfect way will one day be made, the highway of the world. Talk as we will, a straight line is always the shortest route. The sea would sweep in a deep, long bay from the south of the Mexican gulf into the thick of the scraggy, leg-of-mutton-shaped continent of South America; while along the valley of the Amazon, with its vast swamps and scanty population of naked savages, known, if at all, to Marcoy alone, would rush an arm of the sea, a hundred miles in width, to the Pacific side, throwing open to man a garden in which, were not nature so over-profuse, and therefore in effect so hostile, the human race might reach to undescribed heights of luxury and civilization. Access is all that is required to enable man to act, but to little ants like us, who think an eighty-mile ditch a feat — just compare the Suez Canal with the Channel, which is a canal too, though made by a diviner engineer — who take generations to clear a tropical forest, and are beaten by the merest breathings of the moist tropical earth, access to the secluded lands where nature creates in pure sport — or, as Charles Kingsley thought, in order to recreate her own eyes with her own work, — is, except by sea, too toilsome.

Let us turn to Europe. There the work of our philanthropist grows easier, yet more pressing, for it is the specialty of Europe that the minimum of effort there produces the maximum of result. Everything is comparatively minute there except the spirit of man. In Europe nothing in nature is an obstacle, because nothing in nature is grand. Man there controls the "lakes" because they are but widened river-beds — compare Lake Leman and Lake Superior — scales the mountains because, by the side of the Himalayas and the Andes, they are hillocks; joins nations together by the railway, which "crosses the European world" — no bigger than one Asiatic island — and cultivates to perfection countries which would in Asia be provinces, or in America forgotten states. Man developes in Europe because he has the possible before him; he invents ships because he has only to glide from island to island on a summer sea; or he tunnels Mont Cenis by an effort which would scarcely pierce the crust of the Eastern Himalaya. A subsidence of earth not two miles wide along the line of the Ebro would terminate half the difficulties of 