Otago Institute. — 445 
. vast movements, the Press has given consistency to national effort, and the 
Electric Telegraph binds the world together. A mighty intelligence 
sympathetically moves all civilized peoples. The enthusiastic congratulate 
themselves that they live in the age of progress; the thoughtful see that it 
involves higher aims and responsibilities at the same time. The middle-aged 
man can now recount the labours of centuries within his own life’s experience. 
Fifty years ago the United States was practically confined within the bounds 
of the Mississippi and St. Lawrence; now she stretches across the great 
American Continent, and binds her people on the two great oceans by a railway. 
Not less progressive, Great Britain since that time has conquered seven 
empires, and brought 100 millions of people under her sway. I allude to the 
Empire of the East. Forty-six years ago the first steamer made its voyage 
between Edinburgh and London, and I, amongst many thousand spectators, 
saw her pass my native place with my own eyes. In 1836 the second railway 
of Great Britain was completed, which joined the waters of the German Ocean 
and the Irish Sea. In 1838 three steamers only had reached India. The · 
discovery of CErsted was not yet developed into the electric telegraph, so it was 
at that time practically unknown. To navigate the Atlantic Ocean by steam 
was thought to be an impossibility. Ten years later, to join the Red and 
Mediterranean Seas by a canal was thought by almost all English engineers to 
be a chimerical scheme. Now, what have we by the aid of steam and science 
applied to the arts of war as well as peace? National exclusiveness has been 
broken down. Japan and China open their ports and interior districts, and 
their masses surge back upon us In the face of life they react on their 
western brethren, and suffuse their nationality from centre to extremes. 
In the year 1833 Earle gives a most circumstantial account of the killing, 
cooking, and eating of a young Maori girl by her own race. Was this not the 
shadow of coming events, an allegory of the certain fate of so inhuman a race? 
So, when we look at the great movements of the white races during these last 
two hundred years, and mark them by “ observation,” do we not dimly see 
other movements in process? The red-coloured man has been swept off the 
face of the northern continent of America, and so recent and rapid has this 
momentous fact been that even now is to be seen, on the shelves of the 
Boston Library, the Bible translated into one of their languages, which is now 
a dead one. The tribe has passed away. Then, what has made the white 
man—or more conspicuously the Anglo-Saxon—of the Teutonic race so 
ubiquitously progressive and aggressive ; this more especially of so recent a 
date? It is his humanity and science, combined with steam. And what makes 
steam for him? It is coal. What then has coal to do with our race? As far 
as we know yet, everything. Then what will be the effect of coal on our status 
in the world} This is what is not clearly apparent to us as yet. 
