Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/13

10 and these sham things have been blown to the winds. Precisely what Drake, Howard, and Hawkins did for the Invincible Armada, Watt, Brindley, Smeaton, Rennie, Telford, Stephenson, Faraday, Brunei, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson have done for the monopolies which kept the world pinned to its mother's knee—which kept its commerce first in manacles and then in leading strings, and made its traffic to pass through gorgeous toll-bars kept by painted beadles in the pay, and for the profit of secular potentates and sacred popes.

During the past fifty years railways have levelled the mountain, upraised the plain, spanned the river, changed the conditions of human life, and made the land increase the variety of its products, and to become a constant source of increasing and wholesome change. Railways have done much more; there are now more horses, drivers, saddle and harness makers, wheelwrights and coachbuilders than there were before railways, which it was thought would annihilate these. What before was stagnant and deadly, became quick with healthful motion.

What railways have done for the land, steamships have done for the great and wide ocean; and steamships have been the cause of more sailing vessels being employed than would have been employed but for them. By means of railways and steamships the face of the world, so to speak, has got a new expression; it has the graduated face of a clock—not to tell the time to this or that parish, this or that nation, but to universal man. The sun is not more fixed in the centre of the universe to keep the sidereal worlds in time than man is the master of the world to keep all things in time. Let me illustrate this by my own experience. Twenty-three years ago I went on board an English commercial steamer in the port of Cobija, in the Republic of Bolivia, as a passenger bound for Australia on January 6th, lat. S. 24 degrees. I steamed along the coast of Peru, Ecuador, and New Granada, calling at many ports. Arrived at Panama, I took a train to Colon and went on board another English commercial steamer, which carried me to Hayti, to Jamaica, St. Thomas, Barbados, and the Azores to England. Another English commercial steamer carried me to France; a railway built by English skill carried me from Havre to Paris and on to Marseilles, where another English commercial steamer carried me to Malta and Alexandria, where another English built railway carried me across the desert and the Nile to Suez; another English commercial steamer carried me down the Red Sea, hoary with the tales and woes, the triumphs and decay of fifty centuries, to Australia, just then beginning to open its eyes; to Melbourne, lat. S. 38 degrees, where L arrived by contract time on the 13th April, doing a distance of twenty-thousand miles in ninety-six days, with the regularity and punctuality of the best clock in the world.

What was then done in ninety-six days is now done in sixty days; what then cost £200 costs now £80. Every railway over which I travelled, and every steamship in which I was a passenger was built by British skill and the majority with British capital—excepting the Panama railway—the greatest feat in railway construction which, up to then, had