Great Britain and Her Queen - by Anne E. Keeling
good fortune and of bad fortune the iron network has continued to spread itself, until all the land lies
embraced in its ramifications; and it is spreading still, like some strange organism the one condition of
whose life is reproduction, knitting the greatest centres of commerce with the loneliest and remotest
villages that were wont to lie far out of the travelled ways of men, and bringing Ultima Thule
into touch with London.
Meanwhile the steam service by sea has advanced almost with that by land. In 1838 three steamships
crossed the Atlantic between this country and New York, the Great Western, sailing from Bristol,
and Sirius, from Cork, distinguished themselves by the short passages they made, - of fifteen
days in the first case, and seventeen days in the second, - and by their using steam power alone to
effect the transit, an experiment that had not been risked before. It was now proved feasible, and in a year
or two there was set on foot that regular steam communication between the New World and the Old,
which ever since has continued to draw them into always closer connection, as the steamers, like
swift-darting shuttles, weave their multiplying magic lines across the liquid plain between.
The telegraph wires that run beside road and rail, doing the office of nerves in transmitting intelligence
with thrilling quickness from the extremities to the head and from the head to the extremities of our
State, are now so familiar an object, and their operations, such mere matters of every day, that we do not
often recall how utterly unfamiliar they were sixty years ago, when Wheatstone and Cooke on this side
the Atlantic, and Morse on the other, were devising their methods for giving signals and sounding alarms
in distant places by means of electric currents transmitted through metallic circuits. Submarine
telegraphy lay undreamed of in the future, land telegraphy was but just gaining hearing as a practicable
improvement, when the crown was set on Her Majesty's head amid all that pomp and ceremony at
Westminster. A modern English imagination is quite unequal to the task of realising the manifold
hindrances that beset human intercourse at that day, when a journey by coach between places as
important and as little remote from each other as Leeds and Newcastle occupied sixteen mortal hours,
with changes of horses and stoppages for meals on the road, and when letters, unless forwarded by an
"express" messenger at heavy cost, tarried longer on the way than even did passengers; while some
prudent dwellers in the country deemed it well to set their affairs in order and make their wills before
embarking on the untried perils of a journey up to town. These days are well within the memory of many
yet living; but if the newer generations that have arisen during the present reign would understand what it
is to be hampered in their movements and their correspondence as were their fathers, they must seek the
remoter and more savage quarters of Europe, the less travelled portions of America or of half-explored
Australia; they must plunge into Asian or African wilds, untouched by civilisation, where as yet there
runs not the iron horse, worker of greater marvels than the wizard steeds of fairy fable, that could,
transport a single favoured rider over wide distances in little time. The subjugated, serviceable
nature-power Steam, with its fellow-servant the tamed and tutored Lightning, has wonderfully contracted
distance during these fifty years, making the earth, once so vast to human imagination, appear as a globe
shrunken to a tenth of its ancient size, and bringing nations divided by half the surface of that globe
almost within sound of each other's speech.
That there is damage as well as profit in all these increased facilities of intercourse must be apparent,
since there is evil as well as good in the human world, and increased freedom of communication implies
freer communication of the evil as of the good. But we may well hope that the cause of true upward
progress will be most served by the vast inevitable changes which, as they draw all peoples nearer
together, must deepen and strengthen the sense of human brotherhood, and, as they bring the deeds of all
within the knowledge of all, must consume by an intolerable blaze of light the once secret iniquities and
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