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 possess in embryo may be developed into greater availability.  These, operating on an ever-growing stock of material, will convince our era that it is but introductory to a more magnificent and not far distant future.

Magnificent the century is justified in styling its work.  What matter could do for mind and steam for the hand it has done.  But is there any gain in the eye and intellect which perceive, and the hand which fixes, beauty and truth?  Is there any addition to the simple lines, as few and rudimental as the mechanical powers, which embody proportion and harmony, or in the fibres of emotion, as scant but as infinite in their range of tone as the strings of the primeval harp, which ask and respond to no motor but the touch of genius?  Have we surpassed the old song, the old story, the old picture, the old temple?