TOPICS OF THE DAY.
PROGRESSES, ROYAL AND PRACTIUL. PROGRESS has become a cant word, meaning many things • but tbe week illustrates something of them all. Upon the whole, dull as tiniest-worn we are getting en, even in the newer kinds Qf pro- greas well as the older.
A walking forward--surely there is enough of that, literally, in this good country, even at the flattest of seasons P Whether you consider your city man going to business, or your holyday man following the game on the moors, there is undoubtedly much walking onwards amongst us. Or if you drop the literality of walking, and speak only of going forward, on alien locomotive apparatus, undoubtedly the nation that moves by railway enough to put a girdle four or five times round the globe daily, and that fills up the intervals with omnibus and cab, must be said to effect much progress bodily. Then there is your royal progress, with Victoria vice Elizabeth
deceased. Well, upon the whole it will be safe to say that Vic- toria gets on at least as well as Elizabeth did, and rather .better than her contemporaries abroad. Our Queen has not been quite so busy as some others of her condition in other lands ; her progress is not so much encumbered with splendour and state trappings. Nay, it is obstructed in its route by a petty parish board ; for St. Pancras declined to make the Eastern end of that ancient way called " the New Road" passable for the Royal oortege : which was -rude in Vestry. The Queen went round, but we are not aware that her placidity was ruffled by finding a contumacious vestry in her way. Queen Victoria is not in the habit of suddenly setting out lest her path should become dangerously known to her own subjects; neither does she turn hack if a. road break down, anticipating revolt at some Warsaw ; she is not obliged to make unintentional jemmies to Inapruck or Castel Gandolfo ; Democra- tic Pancras does not seize London daring her temporary absence, or make stipulations respecting her return. The very common- places of her quiet but obvious and people-lined path may be envied wonderments to some foreign potentates, whose progresses are his- torical events,—too historical sometimes, since it is not always pleasant to be a salient subject for the moralizing of a future Gibbon.
Frederick William, now, is making a busy progress. He goes
to shake hands with Hanover ; he drops in upon Metternich ; he vouchsafes a lecture to his beloved Colognese on the enormities of Liberalism ; he meets his well-beloved brothers and patrons, Im- perial Russia and Imperial Austria, at Ischl,—where also his wife meets with her sisters. Some _do predict that Frederick William will " progress" into the Roman Catholic Church, at the sugges- tion of his respectable lady ; and they notice that his cousin, Prince Frederick William, heir-apparent to the heir-presumptive, assists devoutly at desuit sermons. A progress that touches at Manover and Metternich, and terminates with the Archduchess Sophia, is rather ominous. On the whole, we English prefer our Queen's- less erratic, more plain, and more unconcealed travels.
The young Emperor, who meets his cousins at Ischl, is expected
at Verona in September, to meet Radetzky and the Italian Princes : not a very propitious progress that! Possibly the expedition may be made quite safe : the court will be clothed in a formidable ar- mour of military splendours, as it was when Francis Joseph made his progress to Olmatz ; sixty general officers sitting in the same carriage with him !—enough to supply an Austerlitz or a Water- loo. Not unreasonably ; for the Absolute Princes of Europe have chosen to make their rule a chronic Waterloo. Even when he is atVerona Italy will never penetrate through the triple divinity which will hedge the Prince—the quickset hedge of Swiss, Hun- garian, and Croat. The ground on which he stands will be as Austrian as if it were in the heart of Vienna ; where he might just as well stay. This is not progress, but regress, or retrogress.
Practical science would fare ill if it made no better way. But, thank Heaven, human is is not tied down to the Imperial
pace or limit. Here a transit company at New York which is outrunning states, international leagues to approximate Atlantic and Pacific, and.all such "slow " proceeders : it has established a route by the Lake of Nicaragua, which brings the ocean that washes the shores of.Europe and Africa within a journey of thirty- five hours from the ocean that washes the shores of Asia.
When Prince _Henry of Portugal named the Cape of Storms the
Cape of Good Hope, he set a telling lesson to those who find lions in their path whenever they try to move onward. It has been a Cape of Good Hope ; it has helped to teach us . how to go back again, by the old way. Already we go to India "over land " and sea ; accomplishing what was not long since " a wild speculation." We are now instructed in a mode of going from London to Cal- cutta, almost entirely over veritable dry land, in seven days. A vast progress that! .But it is not all. New Brunswick taught us that reads make settlements ; the Romans found out that roads make ceder ; we have long known that commerce makes civilization : but a road through the heart of the East will drive through that vast region, after the slumber of ages, the refiuent knowledge from the West, and lay down a path for Progress of every kind.
Truly the world of civilization is getting too large for any em- peror, however colossal, to span it with his single pair of legs and bid mankind walk under them! At least, the news of the week seems to say so : but Retrogress does not like to read the journals of Progress.
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