ENGINEERING FEATS.
IT is amusing to witness the cheerful alacrity with which 1 Engineers are ever proposing grand schemes to bridge over the distances on our globe, and the willingness with which the public give ear to them. Whether it be to tunnel through the Alps or under the Straits of Dover, or cut canals through the isthmuses which connect the northern and southern halves of the Old and New World, or lay telegraph cables under the Atlantic and Pacific, there is apparently no limit to the fertility of the engineer- ing mind, or the mingled awe and delight with which the majority of people read of the successive schemes which are ventilated. At the present moment the run is upon railroads to India, for which the fullness of time seems to have come. The cut- ting of the Suez Canal lately stirred the popular imagination on the subject of our Eastern communications, and now tho opening of the Mont Cenis Tunnel has not only had a similar influ- ence, but it has actually completed in the most effective manner a through railway communication with an extreme south-eastern point in Europe, on the direct road to India. It is natural, there- fore, that engineers and the public should be alike provoked by the long interval interposed between Western Europe and the East by the scantily-peopled regions of the Turkish and Persian empires, which misgovernment and incapacity of race have prevented from being filled up. The missing link is perhaps greater than that which was lately filled up between the Missouri and the Pacific ; but the result, as these matters are judged, with all the East on one side and all Europe on the other, will be proportionally greater, and accordingly the schemes produced are in unexampled abundance. To begin with, there are the old proposals for a Euphrates Valley railway to connect the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and shorten by a week the present overland journey between London and India. But these are the most moderate proposals. Constantinople in a year or two will be connected with the European system, and there are about half-a-dozen schemes to join Constantinople with India, some of them to make a Euphrates Valley line a section of the highway to India, and others to run through the north of Asia Minor and Persia, passing through the Persian capital of Teheran and through Herat and Candahar, on the line by which we have been taught to expect that future invasion of India by Russia in which so many people believe. There is even a third class of schemes by which India is to bo reached through Russia, the Russians pushing a branch from their southern railways across the Caucasus, and so giving us a road to Teheran by which we may get to India as already described. And as if all these were not enough, we have this week a grand scheme for a railway starting eastward from Trieste, skirting the Turkish coast of the Adriatic, and finally crossing to Salonica, from which there would be a short sea passage across the Levant, and then a rail- way to India on the route of the Euphrates Valley line, to be continued along the coast to Kurrachee. Mrs. Burton has also come forward with a proposal this week to vary the 'ordinary routes suggested for the Euphrates Valley line by a deviation which would " develop Syria" and " restore Baalbek and Palmyra to their old importance." Such is a most meagre list of the competing projects which are offered, the very cheapest to cost between eight and ten millions, the most am- bitious, forty millions, and the average, which are strictly limited to the construction of a complete railway between Constantinople and India, between twenty and thirty millions. All are put forward with the most charming confidence, which is perfectly well founded, that the public will be eager to discuss them, the common feeling both among promoters and the public being that the work of devising and executing them is among the most meritorious which man can undertake.
We have certainly no wish to interrupt a work which the engineers who find play for their brains, and the public which baa to supply the means, both appear to like. The tendency to do great feats of engineering is, indeed, so strong, and the material resources are now so great, that they are sure to get done all over the world at a constantly-iucreasing rate. But there cau be no harm, and possibly some profit, in testing the exact value of a popular sentiment, and trying to account for it. It would not be easy, we think, to justify formally the senti- ment in question. So far as we can see, the only unquestionable result of such feats is their contribution to the material wealth of the world. The expense of transit is diminished directly and in- directly, travelling and the conveyance of goods are multiplied with the diminution of expense, and the average real wealth of mankind is consequently increased. This is a tolerably certain result, and as the increase of wealth is no doubt one of the most potent causes of civilization among the masses, the accomplish- ment of great engineering feats may be regarded with the same kind of satisfaction as that which is given by a new discovery in science, or a new application of science in the production of com- mon articles. In this view, however, engineering feats are clearly of far less real importance than the scientific dis- coveries on which, moreover, they are ultimately dependent. A tunnel under the Alps is obviously a trifle compared with the Bessemer process in making steel, or with the invention of the chemical agents by which tunnelling on a great scale is possible. As agencies for increasing wealth, therefore, great engineering feats occupy a very subordinate rank. And there is another drawback to the material results of those feats which have so much attraction for the public mind. It is not quite clear that the wealth of the world is increased by the expenditure on those works which are attractive to the popular imagination to the ex- tent which would be the case if the expenditure was directed to obscurer and more various ends. The Suez Canal, for instance, saves infinitesimal sums in the conveyance of some descriptions of goods between Europe and the East, and a certain number of people travel for two-thirds the former cost ; but the sums saved in one direction are probably less in the aggregate than the losses which shareholders and bondholders sustain through the locking-up of capital which produces no return. The world in the meantime may be poorer instead of richer by the Canal, whatever may be the gain in the end. Thus the principal material result of the peculiar seductiveness of such great schemes may be the actual impoverishment of the generation which makes them, while future generations are in no way richer because the works were sure enough to be executed by the time they would really be profit- able. The fascination of such schemes must, therefore, be justi- fied in some other way than by their addition to material wealth, and the moral and polikical benefits will be alleged ; but clearly no moralist or statesman could be sure of his ground in dealing with arguments of this nature. Politically we cannot be quite sure of a change tending to bring India much more than ever under the direct rule of a Parliament sitting in London, which can neither have leisure nor knowledge for Indian affairs, and where consti- tuencies will probably be moved by the most dangerous prejudices on almost every vital Indian question. How do we know again that engineering feats which bring distant parts of the world together have a direct and beneficial influence on civilization? At best we can only see one side of the results. Among the kindred peoples of Western Europe and America, the minds of the masses are no doubt enlarged by facilities of going up and down among each other and through the world. The educational influence of such travelling, so far as one can judge, is almost a pure benefit to the nature of the Western man. But this is only one side of the matter. The closest contact between Europe and the East, between the most opposite moralities and types of civilization, is as certain a result as the education which will come to Europeans from unlimited travelling, and it would be more than boldness to predict from such contact a net balance of advantage. The Eastern civilization at least will be shaken to its foundations by the contact, with lamentable results probably to the generation which is involved in the transition period ; and we do not feel at all sure that familiarity with the East will not some- what shake the West as well. We look on such contact as in the end inevitable, because the pursuit of wealth with our modern tools and resources is surely bringing it about; but we see no par- ticular reason for rejoicing in a tremendous change in the conditions of life for the various nations of mankind, and for hastening on the change, when the first results will be of a very mixed description. The change must be acquiesced in, but we see in it an additional reason for the anxiety of the present generation about its equipment of moral and religious ideas, rather than a sure sign of the approach of the golden age. How, then, is the peculiar love of engineering feats which bridge over distances to be accounted for, when so little can be said in real justification of the sentiment,—when so few probably who entertain it have ever thought of the reasons? The real explanation, we suspect, is a simple one : the feeling arises partly from the mere love of bigness, and partly from the delight of man
in a visible manifestation of his power over nature. The way in which people talk of tunnelling under the Alps or cutting through the Suez Canal is very much like their talk about the collection of grand armies or any other great display of force. It stirs the blood to watch the play of great powers, whether the product of nature or of human energy, and where the indulgence of certain feelings gives pleasure, it requires a very slight pretext to ascribe everything that is good and noble to their cause, instead of rigorously examining what the real cause of satisfaction may be. The readiness of self-deception in such matters is a remarkable feature of human nature, and we do not think wholly discredit- able ; but the better way is to know that it is self-deception, and seek to have truer sentiments. The delight in man's power over nature, which is associated with this love of bigness in engineer- ing, is rather more noble, and there will be less prejudice against. acknowledging it, though what are thought to be better reasons• have been sought. The truth is that the feeling of delight in power over nature is apt to be held in a vulgar way by those who have no share in the scientific knowledge which constitutes the real power, and whose satisfaction, therefore, resembles the narrow patriotism of a provincial who fancies that the feats of his fellow- countryman are reflected on himself. It is quite right that people should be ashamed of the vulgar part of such feelings, but the remedy is not to find false excuses for the feel- ings themselves, but to entertain them in a right manner and for proper reasons. This will be the more necessary as the world grows and communications daily get closer, so that by and by we may travel almost to the uttermost parts of the earth, in a week. The popular mind, we fear, will be apt to lose iu its familiarity with the world that imaginative stimulus which was. found by the ancients in the unknown boundaries of the old world and by the moderns in the adventurous spirit of discovery which has at length snapped out the world and that sense of great spaces which will probably soon be at an end. It would be some- compensation if a reverent knowledge of science and the secrets- of that wonderful power over nature which man has at length, obtained could take the place of those old feelings of awe and' wonder at the world which weakness and the "sense of distances"' joined to produce.
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