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.
A curious slip, at least, so we presume it to be, occurs in a catalogue issued a short time ago by a well-known bookseller. A work on Xylography — block-printing at the beginning of the fifteenth century — is catalogued, which is said to contain "sixty-nine engravings either from wood or metal, twelve of which bear inscriptions representing scenes of Christian mythology, figures of patriarchs, saints, devils, and other dignitaries of the Church."
The Athenæum states that it is proposed to calendar and publish the records of the Scotch Privy Council from the beginning of Queen Mary's reign down to the Union.
