Wales to accept the proposed constitution retarded matters somewhat. On the other hand, parliamentary elections indicate the near approach of the federal union of Australia. These colonies have probably advanced as far in democratic freedom as any other people in the world; in nearly all of their legislative bodies the upper house is omitted, the majority of a single chamber being absolute.

Beautiful indeed to the eye of the English traveller are New Zealand and Tasmania, but most charming of all is British Columbia, with its noble harbors, its mountains rich in metals, its grassy plains and fertile foothills, its wheat-producing prairies, its rivers lakes and seaboard swarming with fish, its forests of fine timber and inexhaustible coal deposits, with inland scenery which makes tame the grandest that Europe can display.

There are conditions favorable to the expansion of European civilization in other regions than China. Several of the South American countries, where no progress is being made. in science industry or government, are already attracting the attention of those who make it their affair to regenerate and repartition the world.

What would happen were all the towns round the Pacific like Genoa, Amsterdam, or Salem of old? What would happen if one in fifty of our Pacific seaports possessed the men and genius, the intelligence industry and activity, of some of the ancient seats of commercial empire? Such a rise and overturning and awakening and development, intellectual and industrial, moral and political, as the world has never yet seen. Most of us, like Mr Micawber, wait for something to turn up, for some persons or influence, other than ourselves or outside of our efforts, to bring about the means of progress and wealth, instead of doing and achieving in our own proper mind and person.

The leading men of our Pacific coast should be of excep tional quality, being the successors and survivors of a community of picked men, who came early to the gold-fields and agricultural districts and succeeded where others failed, and who survived as seemingly the fittest. Never was a grander opportunity for men having the energy and ability, for men of the kind that built Chicago, and are now building scores of

cities and hundreds of railway lines in various parts,-to come forward and take possession of the Pacific ocean, industrially and commercially, and so dominate the western seaboard of the United States as to make it absolutely the greatest country in the world, and themselves the wealthiest and most beneficial of men.

CHAPTER XVI

INTEROCEANIC COMMUIUICATON

DURING the two decades which elapsed from the discovery f America to the discovery of the Pacific ocean, European cosmographers and navigators were puzzled in regard to several matters. First, this new land, is it continent, or island, or archipelago? If the last, which seemed for a time most probable, then the islands, or groups of islands, must lie scattered along the east coast of Asia, whose existence had been reported by early travellers overland across Asia, and by navigators from the Indian ocean to the Spice islands,-perhaps they were the Zipangu of Polo, or, which would be nearer the proper latitude, the constellation of isles spoken of by Ptolemy as lying between the China sea and the Indian ocean, and which we now know as the Philippines, Java, Sumatra, and their thousand satellites. Secondly, if these were the Asiatic isles as reported, obviously there were many channels or water ways between them leading to the continent.

There was mystery attending it, whatever hypothesis might be adopted, whether this should be called the true India, or regarded as some land intervening. Polo had reported Zipangu as an island 1,500 miles from the mainland; and there might be other islands, at a greater or less distance from Cathay, an ocean full of them. The land which had been found was about where the discoverers expected to find it; the world, as they measured it, was smaller than it is in reality; and then to say that besides a great continent, a vast sea lay between them and Asia, would have been an idea too great to grasp. It remained to be finally brought home to the mind of Magellan during his long and perilous voyage into the unknown, reckoning his leagues by the number of dead dropped into the sea.

It was exasperating to these early navigators, this long wall

of land which so persistently obstructed their passage to the khan's kingdom which they so desired to reach. And when Magellan, the first and only one to find a way through the continent, passed into his strait, he could of course form no conception of the extent of the land he saw lying on his left. It might be a large island, this Tierra del Fuego as he named it, or it might be a small or large continent, extending part or all the way to and around the south pole. Of one thing he was sure, for by this time it had been well searched, that there was no break in the land between Florida and where he entered his strait. Further than that he knew nothing, except that this must be a great sea, as it was probably part of the one seen by Balboa 1,500 leagues to the northward of where he then sailed.

For many years afterward, however, the search was continued, more particularly in the north, where explorations progressed more slowly, the southern continent soon becoming pretty well known to those who followed the track of Magellan in his new route to India. Long indeed was the effort continued, and many were the false reports made; and when a way was finally discovered round the northern end of this line of land which lay stretched out in ocean almost from one end of the earth to the other, it was found to be worthless to commerce. Robert McClure, sailing from England in 1850 and wintering near Melville sound, was the first to make the northwest passage, 328 years after Magellan made the southwest passage; while the northeast passage was made by Nordenskiöld, in 1879, 326 years after the first attempt was made by Willoughby in 1553.

Apocryphal voyages to the Northwest in search of a strait from the Pacific to Hudson bay and the Atlantic were set forth from time to time, like the pretended discoveries of Juan de Fuca as given to geography in 1596 by Michael Lok, an Englishman, and printed in Purchas, His Pilgrimes, in 1625. Fuca was a Greek whom Lok met in Venice, and between them they made out a good story, which was believed for a hundred years or so, that being long for even the truth to endure at the present day. Fuca had been forty years a pilot in the Spanish West India and Pacific service, he said, and was on board the galleon captured by Cavendish off California in 1587. Then he was sent north to fortify the strait

of Anian against the English, which statement answered as well as another, no one then knowing that there was no strait and no Englishmen there. Fuca's falsehood was rewarded by giving to the entrance to Puget sound his name, which it bears to this day, an honor such as is the too frequent reward of a lie well told. Fuca said his strait was 100 miles wide at the entrance; he carefully mapped it, filling up the blank spaces around with cities of the plain, as Quivira, and monsters of the deep, such as all mythical geography then contained; finally, sailing this strait for twenty days he came to the Atlantic ocean. This same Anian strait was first placed further south, where it would cut through the continent at about the mouth of the Columbia river; but as the southern coast became explored, and it became known that no such passage-way existed, rather than lose altogether so interesting a feature, and so betray their ignorance, the map-makers kept shoving it further north, until they finally got it up to Bering strait, where it will probably remain.

The Wytfliet-Ptolemy maps of 1597 assisted to perpetuate mythical geography, being filled with fanciful conjectures received as fact by the scholars. In his Book of Sea Heroes, 1598, Conrad Löw gives a general map supposed to be original, yet copied from Ortelius and Ptolemy, in which the kingdom of California is placed near the north pole, by the large strait of Anian, which separates Asia from America. Then there were the stories told by Torquemada and Father Ascension; the tale of the wonderful island of Zinogaba, rich in pearls; the story of Maldonado, who in 1588 sailed from Labrador into the Polar sea, and through the strait of Anian into the Pacific; the stories of Father Zárate Salmeron, of Pierre d' Avity and Peñalosa, of fathers Kino and Salvatierra, of Admiral Bartholomew de Fonte, whose letter appeared in the London Memoirs for the Curious, in 1708, and others, which if told in full would fill a volume.

Whence it appears that this matter of interoceanic communication, which is now so plain to the members of congress, who would dig the ditch and have done with it if their allopposing politicians and the railway magnates did but graciously permit, was for a century or two a great mystery, which, like all mysteries that cannot be fathomed, men translated to suit their fancy, stoutly asserting the same as fact, and so