THE OLD STORY OF UTOPIA

A steamboat was a prodigious novelty in the waters of the Channel in
182-. The whole coast of Normandy was long strangely excited by it.
Now-a-days, ten or a dozen steam vessels, crossing and recrossing within
the bounds of the horizon, scarcely attract a glance from loiterers on
the shore. At the most, some persons, whose interest or business it is
to note such things, will observe the indications in their smoke of
whether they burn Welsh or Newcastle coal. They pass, and that is all.
"Welcome," if coming home; "a pleasant passage," if outward bound.

Folks were less calm on the subject of these wonderful inventions in the
first quarter of the present century; and the new and strange machines,
and their long lines of smoke regarded with no good-will by the Channel
Islanders. In that Puritanical Archipelago, where the Queen of England
has been censured for violating the Scriptures[2] by using chloroform
during her accouchments, the first steam-vessel which made its
appearance received the name of the "Devil Boat." In the eyes of these
worthy fishermen, once Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots, it
seemed to be a portion of the infernal regions which had been somehow
set afloat. A local preacher selected for his discourse the question of
"Whether man has the right to make fire and water work together when God
had divided them.[3] This beast, composed of iron and fire, did it not
resemble Leviathan? Was it not an attempt to bring chaos again into the
universe? This is not the only occasion on which the progress of
civilisation has been stigmatised as a return to chaos.

"A mad notion--a gross delusion--an absurdity!" Such was the verdict of
the Academy of Sciences when consulted by Napoleon on the subject of
steamboats, early in the present century. The poor fishermen of St.
Sampson may be excused for not being, in scientific matters, any wiser
than the mathematicians of Paris; and in religious matters, a little
island like Guernsey is not bound to be more enlightened than a great
continent like America. In the year 1807, when the first steamboat of
Fulton, commanded by Livingston, furnished with one of Watt's engines,
sent from England, and manoeuvred, besides her ordinary crew, by two
Frenchmen only, Andre Michaux and another, made her first voyage from
New York to Albany, it happened that she set sail on the 17th of August.
The Methodists took up this important fact, and in numberl