Various - The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862

It was wonderful to see the Queen of England, on one side of that chasm of three thousand miles, wave a greeting to the President, and the President wave back a greeting to the Queen. But it was glorious to see that chord quiver with the music and the truth of the angelic song:—

Soon, however, came a check to the excitement. For above a score of days was that mysterious highway kept open from Valentia to Trinity Bay. But then the spell was lost, the waves flowed back, old ocean rolled on as before, and the crossing messages perished, like the hosts of Pharaoh in the sea.

That the miracle is ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated. For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of civilization, its minister of flaming fire! No one should abate a jot from the high hope excited then. No imagination should suffer a cloud on the picture it then painted. Governments and capitalists have not been idle, and will not be discouraged. Already Europe and Africa are connected by an electric tunnel under the sea, five hundred miles in length; already Malta and Alexandria speak to each other through a tube lying under thirteen hundred miles of Mediterranean waters; already Britain bound to Holland and Hanover and Denmark by a triple cord of sympathy which all the tempests of the German Ocean cannot sever. And if we come nearer home, we shall find a project matured which will carry a fiery cordon around the entire coast of our country, linking fortress to fortress, and providing that last, desperate resource of unity, an outer girdle and jointed chain of force, to bind together and save a nation whose inner bonds of peace and love are broken.

Such energy and such success are enough to revive the expectation and to guaranty the coming of the day when we shall behold the electric light playing round the world unquenched by the seas, illuminating the land, revealing nation to nation, and mingling language with language, as if the "cloven tongues like as of fire" had appeared again, and "sat upon each of them."

It will be a strange period, and yet we shall see it. The word spoken here under the sun of mid-day, when it speaks at the antipodes, will be heard under the stars of midnight. Of the world of commerce it may be written, "There shall be no night there!" and of the ancient clock of the sun and stars, "There shall be time no longer!"

When the electric wire shall stretch from Pekin, by successive India stations, to London, and from India, by leaps from island to island, to Australia, and from New York westward to San Francisco, (as has been already accomplished,) and southward to Cape Horn, and across the Atlantic, or over the Strait to St. Petersburg,—when the endless circle is formed, and the magic net-work binds continent, and city, and village, and the isles of the sea, in one,—then who will know the world we live in, for the change that shall come upon it?

Time no more! Space no more! Mankind brought into one vast neighborhood!

Prophesy the greater union of all hearts in this interblending of all minds. Prophesy the boundless spread of civilization, when all barriers are swept away. Prophesy the catholicity of that religion in which as many phases of a common faith shall be endured as there are climes for the common human constitution and countries in a common world!

In those days men will carry a watch, not with a single face, as now, telling only the time of their own region, but a dial-plate subdivided into the disks of a dozen timepieces, announcing at a glance the hour of as many meridian stations on the globe. It will be the fair type of the man who wears it. When human skill shall find itself under this necessity, and mechanism shall reach this perfection, then the soul of that man will become also many-disked. He will be alive with the perpetual consciousness of many zeniths and horizons beside his own, of many nations far different from his own, of many customs, manners, and ideas, which he could not share, but is able to account for and respect.

We can peer as far as this into the future; for what we predict is only a reasonable deduction from certain given circumstances that are nearly around us now. We do not lay all the stress upon the telegraph, as if to attribute everything to it, but because that invention, and its recent crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous discoveries and achievements of man to its aid. It is their last-born child,—the greater for its many parents. There is hardly a science, or an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.

This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive. As it was begotten itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything else in the world of progress. Every scientific or mechanical idea, every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men. There is a kith and kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain. They have their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without father, without mother. Every one is a link in a regular order of generations. Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind, and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science, wonders born out of due time,—deriving no sustenance or support from a wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of old, dying out with their day.

It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been done is sure,—and the past being secure, the future is guarantied. It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of intercommunication,—nothing but some such arbitrary intervention could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable, and what we are to obtain as illimitable.

We come now to another suggestive characteristic of the time,—another of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and strength,—making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on with breathless rapidity . The reason is, that, the farther it has gone, the more it has multiplied its agents. The present generation is not only carried forward, but is excited in every quarter. The activity and versatility of the intellect would appear to be inexhaustible. Instead of getting overstrained, or becoming lethargic, it never was so powerful, never had so many resources, never was so wide-awake. Men are busy turning over every stone in their way, in the hope of finding something new. Nothing would seem too small for human attention, nothing too great for human undertaking. The government Patent-Office, with its countless chambers, is not so large a museum of inventions as the capacious brain of to-day.