Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/446



long period of time can now elapse before a railroad across the Isthmus of Suez, and the opening of the navigation of the Euphrates, will connect the Mediterranean and Indian Seas in the East; and a host of railroads across the Isthmus of Panama must very soon join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the West,—we wish we could also add, would also soon unite Canada and Vancouver in the bonds of brotherhood.

When the entire circumference of onr planet is thus opened to steam and rail, and a girdle can be put about the earth in little more than a hundred days, it will no longer be possible for such countries as China, Japan, Cochin-China, Siam, and Burmah, notwithstanding their sullen system of seclusion, to remain long unopcn to a busy, inquisitive, and progressive world. In proportion as such strides bring us nearer to these strange countries, in the same proportion do they become objects of interest. The expedition of the Anglo-Americans to Japan, which some years ago would have attracted no more attention than did the conflict of the French with the Annamese, in 1847, is at the present fraught with the deepest interest to civilisation and to the welfare of our species generally. The wars perpetually recurring with the insolent Burmahs must end in their affiliation by the Anglo-Indian Empire, or the humiliation of the latter. These wars have already, by the occupation of, once a Siamese province, brought us into contact with the heart of the Hindu-Chinese countries. The gold-discoveries in California and Australia, and the consequent rapid settlement of those countries, the colonisation of New Zealand, the opening of Borneo, the growing importance of the Sandwich Islands, all tend in bringing those ties closer and closer, which would be capped by gold-discoveries or other efficient causes of colonisation of Upper Oregon and Vancouver, and a rail-communication between the Columbia and the St. Lawrence.

Already, shipwrecked Japanese have been conveyed back from Mexico across the Pacific, westward; and the now-established emigration of the Chinese—almost as ungraciously met by Brother Jonathan as if he had been a Chinaman, and the Chinese the barbarian—to California, is one of the most remarkable incidents in the history of the human race that has occurred since the discovery of the New World. The existing relations established between Europe and China, as a result of the, place the latter country—next to Russia, the greatest empire in the world—in a different category to Japan and the Hindu-Chinese states. We have already treated of the progress of events in Japan and Burmah; and to those who would like to peruse the history of the woe with China, rendered the more especially interesting from being derived chiefly from the documents of the Chinese themselves, we cannot but