France as
by Fiji!

If almighty steam and sail must remain unequal to this task, wondrous
indeed are their other potencies. They have contracted the globe like
a dried apple, only in a far greater degree. In 1776 three years
was the usual allotment of the grand tour. Beginning at London, it
extended to Naples and occasionally Madrid. It often left out Vienna,
and more frequently Berlin. In the same period you may now put a
girdle round the earth ninefold thick. You may, given the means
and the faculties, set up business establishments at San Francisco,
Yokohama, Shanghai, Canton, Calcutta, Bombay, Alexandria, Rome, Paris,
London and New York, and visit each once a quarter. The goods to
supply them may travel, however bulky, on the same ship and nearly the
same train in point of speed with yourself. Nowhere farther than a few
weeks from home in person, nowhere are you more remote verbally than a
few hours. The Red Sea opens to your footsteps, as it did to those of
Moses; and the lightning that bears your words cleaves the pathway of
Alexander and the New World for which he wept.

It is really hard to mention these innovations on the old ways, so
vast and so sudden, without degenerating into rhetoric or bombast. The
spread-eagle style comes naturally to an epoch that soars on quick
new wing above all the others. We have it in all shapes--- equally
startling and true in figures of arithmetic or figures of speech. Any
school-boy can tell you, if you give him the dimensions of the Great
Pyramid and state thirty-three thousand pounds one foot high in a
minute as the conventional horse-power, how many hours it would take a
pony-team picked out of the hundreds of thousands of steam-engines on
the two continents to raise it. He will reduce to the same prosaic but
eloquent form a number of like problems illustrative of the command
obtained over some of the forces of Nature, and their employment
in multiplying and economizing manual strength and dexterity and
stimulating ingenuity. When we come to contemplate the whole edifice
of modern production, it seems to simplify itself into one new motor
applied to the old mechanical powers, which may perhaps in turn be
condensed into one--the inclined plane. This helps to the impression
that the structure is not only sure to be enlarged, as we see it
enlarging day by day, but to grow into novel and more striking
aspects. Additional motors will probably be discovered, or some we
already