The Future of Commerce. 17 



twenty or twenty-five miles a day is now moved five hundred 

 miles a day Ijy water and eight hundred miles by land. Corre- 

 spondence, then carried no faster than freight, is now borne b)^ 

 telegraph to the farthest ends of the world. 



All these changes have taken place within a single generation ; 

 for our fathers could not travel any faster than Alexander or 

 Cft'sar. Steamships, railroads and telegraphs within that time 

 have transformed all commercial transactions and the methods 

 of commercial business. Formerly eight months were required 

 to execute an order in India or China and obtain the return; 

 now one day is sufficient. These commercial changes caused a 

 revolution in the modes of business, and were the main factors 

 which produced the monetary disturbances of 1873, the effects 

 of which we yet feel, so long has it taken the world to adjust 

 itself to its new relations. 



The Future of Commerce. 



The commerce of the world originated in Asia ; it was carried to 

 Africa and thence to Europe, and from Europe to America. This 

 movement can go no farther westward, for on the other side of 

 the Pacific is China, which has successfully resisted every at- 

 tempt of the European to encroach upon her domains, and India 

 with its teeming population of two hundred and fifty millions; 

 so that America, the last of the continents to be inhabited, now 

 receives the wealth of India and Asia pouring into it from the 

 west, and the manufactures and population of Europe from the 

 east. Here the east and west, different from each other in mental 

 power and civilization, Avill meet, each alone incomplete, each 

 essential to the fullest and most symmetrical development of the 

 other. Here will be the great banking and commercial houses 

 of the world, the center of business, wealth and population. 



The end is not yet. Inventions are increasing in a geometric 

 rather than an arithmetric progression. The limit of steam 

 power has not been reached, for with a high temperature in the 

 steam-boiler the addition of a few pounds of coal increases the 

 steam power so greatly that we are unable either to control or 

 to use it. 



Electricity has just begun to offer new opportunities to com- 

 merce. We are no longer compelled to carry our factories to the 



3— Nat. Geog. Mag., vol. IV, 1892. 



