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 (Ersted 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 gi^eat 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 1 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 i-ecent a 

 date 1 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. 



