OCEAN CURRENTS 129 



they have devoured every item of so-called sport 

 chronicled therein. Their ideas of the great national 

 issues at stake, irrespective of party, are beyond all 

 question lamentably, pitifully feeble and ignorant, and 

 that, not because they lack any of those intellectual 

 attributes that men should have, but because they have 

 deliberately chosen to stultify their intelligence by 

 turning it to things that do not matter. 



One word more on this extraneous matter and I 

 have done. We are almost at a crisis in our national 

 career I am not sure that we are not really there 

 yet we still find in our great newspapers leaders and 

 formers of public opinion that there are not merely 

 columns but pages on golf and bridge and racing, 

 cricket and football, of which it is safe to say that not 

 one word is calculated to be of the slightest benefit to 

 any human being, but rather that it all tends to a 

 complete national degradation. 



To return to my subject, without any apologies for 

 the digression, the place of honour having been given 

 to the Gulf Stream, as of right, there does not remain 

 a great deal to be said about other great currents of 

 the world ; at least, not in an article like this. For 

 one reason, the main causes of these great currents are 

 the same, but none of them have the same far-reaching 

 effects upon mankind. And this has held true since 

 the dawn of European transoceanic navigation. The 

 old Vikings who discovered America centuries before 

 Columbus did so by making almost a coasting voyage 

 of it from Norway to Shetland or Faroe, thence across 

 to Iceland, then to Greenland, then to Labrador, and 

 so south to Markland, which was probably on the coast 

 of Maine or Massachusetts. And from a consideration 



