Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/545

Rh of picturesque romance no less than the student of commercial geography. It also supplies suggestions and many facts, both to the physical geographer and to the student of seismic phenomena. Science has taught the companies to economize time, labor and material in cable-laying operations, as well as how to improve the working instruments. Human ingenuity, business perception and organizing power have shown once more their startling possibilities when directed and controlled by cool, clear-eyed intelligence combined with general mental capacity.

It is only necessary to reaffirm, for the reasons already given, the national, the imperial, the commonwealth requirement for cheap telegraphy, and the profound necessity there is both strategically and politically for complete government control by purchase, guarantee or other equitable means over main cables which connect Great Britain with her daughter states, her Indian empire, and her dependencies. Our communications with our own folk must be independent of private companies and completely independent of all foreign nations.

All the details which I have given are illustrative of man's successful energy and of his progressive ingenuity in enslaving the great forces of the earth to diminish distance, to shorten world-journeys, and to speed world-messages. Another human achievement, the piercing by Lesseps of the Suez Isthmus, has had remarkable consequences. It had been talked of in England centuries ago. Christopher Marlowe makes Tamerlane brag:

 And here, not far from Alexandria, Whereas the Tyrrhene and the Red Sea meet, Being distant less than full a hundred leagues, I meant to cut a channel to them both That men might quickly sail to India.'

The illustrious French engineer solved one great problem in 1869, only to originate others which are of profound importance to commercial geography—and to the British Empire most of all. The Suez Canal has brought India and the Australasian Commonwealth wonderfully near to our shores. It has greatly diminished many time-distances, but why has it not injured our Eastern trade? Also is there any danger or menace of danger to that trade? From the very beginnings of the great commerce, the Eastern trade has enriched every nation which obtained its chief share. It has been the seed of the bitterest animosities. It alienated Dutch and English, blood relations, co-religionists, co-reformers, into implacable resentment, and bitter has the retribution been. On the other hand it brought into temporary alliance such strange bedfellows as the Turks of the sixteenth century and the Venetians. At the present day