What a tremendous affair it was, the world of Homer, with its
indeterminate boundaries, vast regions, and immeasurable distances. The
Mediterranean and the Euxine were illimitable stretches of ocean waste
over which years could be spent in endless wandering. On their
mysterious shores were the improbable homes of impossible peoples. The
Great Sea, the Broad Sea, the Boundless Sea; the Ethiopians, "dwelling
far away, the most distant of men," and the Cimmerians, "covered with
darkness and cloud," where "baleful night is spread over timid mortals."
Phoenicia was a sore journey, Egypt simply unattainable, while the
Pillars of Hercules marked the extreme edge of the universe. Ulysses was
nine days in sailing from Ismarus the city of the Ciconians, to the
country of the Lotus-eaters--a period of time which to-day would breed
anxiety in the hearts of the underwriters should it be occupied by the
slowest tramp steamer in traversing the Mediterranean and Black Seas from
Gibraltar to Sebastopol.
Homer's world, restricted to less than a drummer's circuit, was
nevertheless immense, surrounded by a thin veneer of universe--the Stream
of Ocean. But how it has shrunk! To-day, precisely charted, weighed,
and measured, a thousand times larger than the world of Homer, it is
become a tiny speck, gyrating to immutable law through a universe the
bounds of which have been pushed incalculably back. The light of Algol
shines upon it--a light which travels at one hundred and ninety thousand
miles per second, yet requires forty-seven years to reach its
destination. And the denizens of this puny ball have come to know that
Algol possesses an invisible companion, three and a quarter millions of
miles away, and that the twain move in their respective orbits at rates
of fifty-five and twenty-six miles per second. They also know that
beyond it are great chasms of space, innumerable worlds, and vast star
systems.
While much of the shrinkage to which the planet has been subjected is due
to the increased knowledge of mathematics and physics, an equal, if not
greater, portion may be ascribed to the perfection of the means of
locomotion and communication. The enlargement of stellar space,
demonstrating with stunning force the insignificance of the earth, has
been negative in its effect; but the quickening of travel and
intercourse, by making the earth's parts accessible and knitting them
together, has been positive.
The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious. The
cabbage, should its environment tend to become worse, must live it out,
or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better. But, after all, the
swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The first
large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first
salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be
classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in
that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to
the strong. But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of
other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded
by his lower limbs. He swam in the sea, and, still better, becoming
aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned to navigate its surface.
Likewise, from among the land animals he chose the more likely to bear
him and his burdens. The next step was the domestication of these useful
aids. Here, in its organic significance, natural selection ceased to
concern itself with locomotion. Man had displayed his impatience at her
tedious methods and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs.
Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or
faster-running men ceased to be bred. The one, half-amphibian, breasting
the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an
enemy who propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden
paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with
a foe who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken
stallion.
So, in that dim day, man took upon himself the task of increasing his
dominion over space and time, and right nobly has he acquitted himself.
Because of it he became a road builder and a bridge builder; likewise, he
wove clumsy sails of rush and matting. At a very remote period he must
also have recognized that force moves along the line of least resistance,
and in virtue thereof, placed upon his craft rude keels which enabled him
to beat to windward in a seaway. As he excelled in these humble arts,
just so did he add to his power over his less progressive fellows and lay
the foundations for the first glimmering civilizations--crude they were
beyond conception, sporadic and ephemeral, but each formed a necessary
part of the groundwork upon which was to rise the mighty civilization of
our latter-day world.
Divorced from the general history of man's upward climb, it would seem
incredible that so long a time should elapse between the moment of his
first improvements over nature in the matter of locomotion and that of
the radical changes he was ultimately to compass. The principles which
were his before history was, were his, neither more nor less, even to the
present century. He utilized improved applications, but the principles
of themselves were ever the same, whether in the war chariots of Achilles
and Pharaoh or the mail-coach and diligence of the European traveller,
the cavalry of the Huns or of Prince Rupert, the triremes and galleys of
Greece and Rome or the East India-men and clipper ships of the last
century. But when the moment came to alter the methods of travel, the
change was so sweeping that it may be safely classed as a revolution.
Though the discovery of steam attaches to the honour of the last century,
the potency of the new power was not felt till the beginning of this. By
1800 small steamers were being used for coasting purposes in England;
1830 witnessed the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; while
it was not until 1838 that the Atlantic was first crossed by the
steamships _Great Western_ and _Sirius_. In 1869 the East was made
next-door neighbour to the West. Over almost the same ground where had
toiled the caravans of a thousand generations, the Suez Canal was dug.
Clive, during his first trip, was a year and a half _en route_ from
England to India; were he alive to-day he could journey to Calcutta in
twenty-two days. After reading De Quincey's hyperbolical description of
the English mail-coach, one cannot down the desire to place that
remarkable man on the pilot of the White Mail or of the Twentieth
Century.
But this tremendous change in the means of locomotion meant far more than
the mere rapid transit of men from place to place. Until then, though
its influence and worth cannot be overestimated, commerce had eked out a
precarious and costly existence. The fortuitous played too large a part
in the trade of men. The mischances by land and sea, the mistakes and
delays, were adverse elements of no mean proportions. But improved
locomotion meant improved carrying, and commerce received an impetus as
remarkable as it was unexpected. In his fondest fancies James Watt could
not have foreseen even the approximate result of his invention, the
Hercules which was to spring from the puny child of his brain and hands.
An illuminating spectacle, were it possible, would be afforded by
summoning him from among the Shades to a place in the engine-room of an
ocean greyhound. The humblest trimmer would treat him with the
indulgence of a child; while an oiler, a greasy nimbus about his head and
in his hand, as sceptre, a long-snouted can, would indeed appear to him a
demigod and ruler of forces beyond his ken.
It has ever been the world's dictum that empire and commerce go hand in
hand. In the past the one was impossible without the other. Rome
gathered to herself the wealth of the Mediterranean nations, and it was
only by an unwise distribution of it that she became emasculated and lost
both power and trade. With a just system of economics it is highly
probable that for centuries she could have held back the welling tide of
the Germanic peoples. When upon her ruins rose the institutions of the
conquering Teutons, commerce slipped away, and with it empire. In the
present, empire and commerce have become interdependent. Such wonders
has the industrial revolution wrought in a few swift decades, and so
great has been the shrinkage of the planet, that the industrial nations
have long since felt the imperative demand for foreign markets. The
favoured portions of the earth are occupied. From their seats in the
temperate zones the militant commercial nations proceed to the
exploitation of the tropics, and for the possession of these they rush to
war hot-footed. Like wolves at the end of a gorge, they wrangle over the
fragments. There are no more planets, no more fragments, and they are
yet hungry. There are no longer Cimmerians and Ethiopians, in
wide-stretching lands, awaiting them. On either hand they confront the
naked poles, and they recoil from unnavigable space to an intenser
struggle among themselves. And all the while the planet shrinks beneath
their grasp.
Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a commercial power
must be a sea power. Upon the control of the sea depends the control of
trade. Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for
thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground
was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid
edifices. The cities of Italy were the world's merchants till new trade
routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west
and fell into other hands. Spain and Portugal, inaugurating an era of
maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way
before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment
to the soil, had returned to their ancient element. With the destruction
of her Armada Spain's colossal dream of colonial empire passed away.
Against the new power Holland strove in vain, and when France
acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the sea, she at the same
time relinquished her designs upon the world. Hampered by her feeble
navy, her contest for supremacy upon the land was her last effort and
with the passing of Napoleon she retired within herself to struggle with
herself as best she might. For fifty years England held undisputed sway
upon the sea, controlled markets, and domineered trade, laying, during
that period, the foundations of her empire. Since then other naval
powers have arisen, their attitudes bearing significantly upon the
future; for they have learned that the mastery of the world belongs to
the masters of the sea.
That many of the phases of this world shrinkage are pathetic, goes
without question. There is much to condemn in the rise of the economic
over the imaginative spirit, much for which the energetic Philistine can
never atone. Perhaps the deepest pathos of all may be found in the
spectacle of John Ruskin weeping at the profanation of the world by the
vandalism of the age. Steam launches violate the sanctity of the
Venetian canals; where Xerxes bridged the Hellespont ply the filthy
funnels of our modern shipping; electric cars run in the shadow of the
pyramids; and it was only the other day that Lord Kitchener was in a
railroad wreck near the site of ancient Luxor. But there is always the
other side. If the economic man has defiled temples and despoiled
nature, he has also preserved. He has policed the world and parked it,
reduced the dangers of life and limb, made the tenure of existence less
precarious, and rendered a general relapse of society impossible. There
can never again be an intellectual holocaust, such as the burning of the
Alexandrian library. Civilizations may wax and wane, but the totality of
knowledge cannot decrease. With the possible exception of a few trade
secrets, arts and sciences may be discarded, but they can never be lost.
And these things must remain true until the end of man's time upon the
earth.
Up to yesterday communication for any distance beyond the sound of the
human voice or the sight of the human eye was bound up with locomotion.
A letter presupposed a carrier. The messenger started with the message,
and he could not but avail himself of the prevailing modes of travel. If
the voyage to Australia required four months, four months were required
for communication; by no known means could this time be lessened. But
with the advent of the telegraph and telephone, communication and
locomotion were divorced. In a few hours, at most, there could be
performed what by the old way would have required months. In 1837 the
needle telegraph was invented, and nine years later the Electric
Telegraph Company was formed for the purpose of bringing it into general
use. Government postal systems also came into being, later to
consolidate into an international union and to group the nations of the
earth into a local neighbourhood. The effects of all this are obvious,
and no fitter illustration may be presented than the fact that to-day, in
the matter of communication, the Klondike is virtually nearer to Boston
than was Bunker Hill in the time of Warren.
A contemporaneous and remarkable shrinkage of a vast stretch of territory
may be instanced in the Northland. From its rise at Lake Linderman the
Yukon runs twenty-five hundred miles to Bering Sea, traversing an almost
unknown region, the remote recesses of which had never felt the
moccasined foot of the pathfinder. At occasional intervals men wallowed
into its dismal fastnesses, or emerged gaunt and famine-worn. But in the
fall of 1896 a great gold strike was made--greater than any since the
days of California and Australia; yet, so rude were the means of
communication, nearly a year elapsed before the news of it reached the
eager ear of the world. Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfits at
Dyea. Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty
miles away. Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road
builder and bridge builder unheard of. With heavy packs upon their backs
men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents
by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of
the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable
glaciers. When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they
went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it
into boats. In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the
long chain of lakes. Within the memory of the writer there lingers the
picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half
a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound. Day after day they struggled
against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night
returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened. At the rapids
they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infinite toil and
hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice flood, arrived at the Klondike.
From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had
paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements.
A year later, so greatly had the country shrunk, the tourist, on
disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway
coach. A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious
river steamer. At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage
on another steamer below. And in a few hours more he was in Dawson,
without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear. Did he
wish to communicate with the outside world, he strolled into the
telegraph office. A few short months before he would have written a
letter and deemed himself favoured above mortals were it delivered within
the year.
From man's drawing the world closer and closer together, his own affairs
and institutions have consolidated. Concentration may typify the chief
movement of the age--concentration, classification, order; the reduction
of friction between the parts of the social organism. The urban tendency
of the rural populations led to terrible congestion in the great cities.
There was stifling and impure air, and lo, rapid transit at once attacked
the evil. Every great city has become but the nucleus of a greater city
which surrounds it; the one the seat of business, the other the seat of
domestic happiness. Between the two, night and morning, by electric
road, steam railway, and bicycle path, ebbs and flows the middle-class
population. And in the same direction lies the remedy for the tenement
evil. In the cleansing country air the slum cannot exist. Improvement
in road-beds and the means of locomotion, a tremor of altruism, a little
legislation, and the city by day will sleep in the country by night.
What a play-ball has this planet of ours become! Steam has made its
parts accessible and drawn them closer together. The telegraph
annihilates space and time. Each morning every part knows what every
other part is thinking, contemplating, or doing. A discovery in a German
laboratory is being demonstrated in San Francisco within twenty-four
hours. A book written in South Africa is published by simultaneous
copyright in every English-speaking country, and on the following day is
in the hands of the translators. The death of an obscure missionary in
China, or of a whisky smuggler in the South Seas, is served up, the world
over, with the morning toast. The wheat output of Argentine or the gold
of Klondike is known wherever men meet and trade. Shrinkage or
centralization has been such that the humblest clerk in any metropolis
may place his hand on the pulse of the world. And because of all this,
everywhere is growing order and organization. The church, the state;
men, women, and children; the criminal and the law, the honest man and
the thief, industry and commerce, capital and labour, the trades and the
professions, the arts and the sciences--all are organizing for pleasure,
profit, policy, or intellectual pursuit. They have come to know the
strength of numbers, solidly phalanxed and driving onward with singleness
of purpose. These purposes may be various and many, but one and all,
ever discovering new mutual interests and objects, obeying a law which is
beyond them, these petty aggregations draw closer together, forming
greater aggregations and congeries of aggregations. And these, in turn,
vaguely merging each into each, present glimmering adumbrations of the
coming human solidarity which shall be man's crowning glory.
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA.
_January_ 1900.