Littell's Living Age/Volume 126/Issue 1622/A Geographical Day-Dream

From The Spectator.

A GEOGRAPHICAL DAY-DREAM.

We all admire M. de Lesseps, and all hope that some one as energetic, though perhaps less fluent, will obtain an equal success in the attack on the Isthmus of Panama; but just think for a moment — there being no politics stirring, no scandal afloat, and no German victory quite imminent — what a world we could make of it if we could really interfere with geography, could, by any development of energy, or science, or human controlling volition over matter, alter at all seriously the natural features of the earth! It is interesting, if useless, to dream sometimes, and the magnitude of the results which very slight geographical changes would effect — changes smaller, most of them, than the rise of Santorin, or the subsidence of the Runn of Cutch, or the drying-up of the Baltic, or the upheaval of the great Steppe, or many another process men of science believe to be going on — tempts day-dreamers to their enjoyment. Suppose a competent politician, who was also a philanthropist large-minded enough to weigh the permanent welfare of humanity against the loss of a few lives, to be invested with such power, and think what he might accomplish. Northern Asia, now the most inaccessible of all the temperate regions, a mighty tract almost useless to civilized man, a tract larger than Western Europe and possessed of all climates, would instantly be accessible, for the valley of the Amour, subsiding from the source of the river to within three miles of its mouth for five hundred feet, would become a mighty lake, ten miles wide and two thousand miles long, giving admittance to the fleets of the world into the heart of secluded Asia. The Brahmapootra would become an Amazon, cleaving open the unknown regions between Bengal and Western China, and pouring not into the sea, but into a mighty fiord sixty miles wide, which should replace the swampy, unhealthy Terai of the Himalayas, and turning India into an island, would terminate forever the dangers of invasion from the north, and multiply twenty-fold the points of contact between the great peninsula and European civilization. Far away to the south, Central Australia, depressed for a few hundred feet, would return to the appearance it once must have borne, and the useless solidity of a continent too new for culture, with its rivers wasting themselves in sand from inability to run up-hill to the sea, be exchanged for a Mediterranean surrounded by a belt of splendid colonies, all accessible by water on both sides. Far to the north-west — we are speaking now as if from Calcutta — the junction of the Black Sea and the Caspian, of which the Russian czars and their German engineers are dreaming, would be effected on a scale — say, a channel thirty miles wide — which would bring Persia, South-Eastern Russia, and the Turkoman Steppes within easy sail of the Mediterranean, and therefore of all the influences of the modern world. The Volga, tripled in volume, would be open to ships instead of boats, and the maritime passes of Asia, the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, widened to thirty miles by a subsidence of their borders, would let out Russia freely to the outer world, terminate the hunger of St. Petersburg for Constantinople, shift the Russian centre of gravity to Perekop, and make of sixty millions of semi-Asiatics Europeans. Careless of all patriotisms except the planetary one, our philanthropist would strike a second blow for Russia, and submerging Lapland, and restoring the Scandinavian peninsula to its old position as an island, place the eastern half of Europe in direct and constant relation with the Atlantic. It is water-communication which now, in the popular belief, civilizes nations, whether it be by insuring collision of ideas, or, as a recent German philosopher maintains in the teeth of facts, by arousing the enery of islanders, who, isolated on all sides by the sea, must strive strenuously or perish. He was thinking of Englishmen when he laid down that doctrine, and forgot, as European philosophers so constantly forget, that the Tasmanian enjoyed all the physical conditions to which our ancestors were subjected, and did not become energetic at all, but passed out of existence, useful, to human eyes, only because the grass grew richer above his grave. We need not, however, mind that in a day-dream.

Turning to Africa, the Northern Desert, the boundless Sahara, would subside again till a smaller Mediterranean made the coast-belt valuable, and Central Africa accessible; while another deep and broad fiord stretching from sea to sea in the twenty-eighth parallel of south latitude, would make of the South-African Dominion a huge island, fit for the abode of an English-speaking people, who, so placed, might multiply as if they were in North America. Neither the tsetse-fly nor the Zulu savage can cross salt-water. In North America, again, three more deep lakes, as large as Lake Superior, with connecting rivers, would carry on the chain of internal navigation from the Atlantic to the North Pacific; while the subsidence of the Isthmus of Panama for its whole length would open what ought to be, and in some slow, imperfect way will one day be made, the highway of the world. Talk as we will, a straight line is always the shortest route. The sea would sweep in a deep, long bay from the south of the Mexican gulf into the thick of the scraggy, leg-of-mutton-shaped continent of South America; while along the valley of the Amazon, with its vast swamps and scanty population of naked savages, known, if at all, to Marcoy alone, would rush an arm of the sea, a hundred miles in width, to the Pacific side, throwing open to man a garden in which, were not nature so over-profuse, and therefore in effect so hostile, the human race might reach to undescribed heights of luxury and civilization. Access is all that is required to enable man to act, but to little ants like us, who think an eighty-mile ditch a feat — just compare the Suez Canal with the Channel, which is a canal too, though made by a diviner engineer — who take generations to clear a tropical forest, and are beaten by the merest breathings of the moist tropical earth, access to the secluded lands where nature creates in pure sport — or, as Charles Kingsley thought, in order to recreate her own eyes with her own work, — is, except by sea, too toilsome.

Let us turn to Europe. There the work of our philanthropist grows easier, yet more pressing, for it is the specialty of Europe that the minimum of effort there produces the maximum of result. Everything is comparatively minute there except the spirit of man. In Europe nothing in nature is an obstacle, because nothing in nature is grand. Man there controls the "lakes" because they are but widened river-beds — compare Lake Leman and Lake Superior — scales the mountains because, by the side of the Himalayas and the Andes, they are hillocks; joins nations together by the railway, which "crosses the European world" — no bigger than one Asiatic island — and cultivates to perfection countries which would in Asia be provinces, or in America forgotten states. Man developes in Europe because he has the possible before him; he invents ships because he has only to glide from island to island on a summer sea; or he tunnels Mont Cenis by an effort which would scarcely pierce the crust of the Eastern Himalaya. A subsidence of earth not two miles wide along the line of the Ebro would terminate half the difficulties of Spain, or along the line of Colbert's Canal double the wealth of France; while an upheaval of soil for a few miles east of Cantyre and Pembrokeshire would make of Ireland a British province, with a landlocked sea between the islands as beautiful and as useful as that most marvellous arrangement of nature, the inland Sea of Japan. A mountain range, across the fertile steppe which we call Poland, would relieve Western Europe of a nightmare, while Bohemia, to perfect the capacities of Europe, must, we fear disappear into a lake.

It is a pleasant dream, and yet, — and yet our philanthropist, if he possessed all the power we have imagined, and could use it all seriously, would, if his brain were at all equal to his will, probably do nothing. It is for man that man must work, and there is not the most shadowy proof in the history of man that all this accessibility, for which politicians and philanthropists so sigh, for which mankind is making such efforts that it almost confuses mere means of locomotion with happier life, has benefited man one jot. Out of the most secluded region of the earth, from the eaves of the "Roof of the World," from the northern slope of the Hindoo Koosh, away from all possible external stimulus, poured in the infancy of history the dominant race of man, the Aryan family, the one clan which has possessed in the highest degree the faculty of accumulation. The fairest and most accessible island of the world, Ceylon, contains its lowest race, the Veddahs, who live naked in the tree-tops, and have invented nothing, unless it be a bow. Mr. Buckle could not have found on earth a region where his conditions of civilization exist in such perfection as that which surrounds the inland Sea of Japan, and there are there, after three thousand years, only the Japanese. The Amazon, the grandest gate possessed by any continent, yields only the Guarani. The Tasmanian, as well off geographically as Shakespeare, never discovered fire. All conditions of earthly progress meet at Baiæ, and we have but the Neapolitan lazzarone as their out-turn. The one unhealthy and dreary morsel of Italy, the Campagna, bred the people who mastered earth and established law, while the race which has now risen to the top of the world has been moaning for two centuries that it has neither navigable river nor convenient shore. Out of the secluded forest, the German; out of pathless Arabia, the Saracen; out of the humid, chilly land, where nothing is indigenous but the oak, the sloe, and the crab-apple, the Englishman. We owe to a leprous clan in an arid corner of the Mediterranean religion; to thirty thousand lazy aristocrats basking in the summer of Attica while their slaves worked for them, art and political sense; to the skin-clad inhabitant of the dreary forest of Central Europe, personal freedom. Were all the changes we have dreamed accomplished, man would be only more active, certainly not happier, and probably no wiser. Pierce Asia with fiords, and there is no proof that its people would advance, any more than they have done in lands like Burmah, where every man has water-communication from his own door to Southampton, or like the Sandwich Isles, where, blessed with the climate of Paradise and a summer sea always playing at their feet, a race of lissom, light-hearted savages is perishing of vice. The Buckle theory is not true, or is true only to a degree scarcely appreciable in that philosophy which will one day study man, instead of man as he appears in a minute corner of one hemisphere, — and with the Buckle theory disappears both the sense and the interest of this dream.