Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 | Page 5

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;