Does any marvel exceed this in apparent absurdity--that you, in London or Edinburgh, shall be able to communicate instantaneously with your friend or relative at St Petersburg or Vienna; for which purpose you have but to touch a few keys denoting letters of the alphabet, and under water and over land your whole thoughts pass as soon as your fingers have delivered them to the keys--nay, the letters are forestalling your thought, and those before it? Does it not seem very absurd to say that all the foreign news may be at your breakfast-table, fresh from every capital in Europe, before the _Times_ can be published and circulated? How will the practice of the press be affected by this novelty? "The latest intelligence" becomes a bygone tale, "flat, stale, and unprofitable." Far greater things than the poet dreamed of become daily realities. Richest in fancy, Shakspeare apologetically covers the incredible ubiquity of his Ariel with a sense of fatigue--of difficulty in his various passages--Ariel, the spirit who
"thought it much to tread The ooze of the salt deep."
Our Government officers will have ready on the instant, messengers far swifter than Ariel--wondrous performers on the "slack-wires." They will put you
"A girdle round about the earth In forty minutes."
No; that was the lagging, loitering pace of the old spirit. It will not take forty seconds. What are thousands of miles to a second of time? Time is, as it were, annihilated: the sand in the glass must be accelerated, or the glass, held for ages, taken out of his hand, and some national exhibition ransacked for a new hour-instrument. The Prospero's wand broken, and newer wonders to be had for a trifle. Fortunatus's "wishing-cap" to be bought at the corner-shop, and the famed "seven-league boots" next door--and to be had cheap, considering, that you may tell all your thoughts, at ever so great a distance, by a little bell and a wire, while you are sitting in your armchair. It will be quite an easy matter to
Railroads and the Submarine Telegraph more than double man's life, if we count his years by action. History itself must now begin as from a new epoch. All the doings of the world, through this rapidity given to person and to thought, must be so altered as to bear no parallel with the past. The old locomotive and communicating powers are defunct--they are as the water that has passed the mill. It must grind with that which succeeds. They are new powers that must set the wheels of governments and of all the world's machinery in motion.