16th May. Mr. Gorge Francis TRaty is not much of a prophet in his own country; but no one, in the light of his utterances lately recorded from Hongkong, can deny that in the expression of opinions he is a aman of courage. To choose the moment when the last rivet was being driven into the Forth Bridge for the enunciation of a scheme whereby a combination of foreign nations is to beat England in the race round the world, is surely the climax of audacity and cannot fail to revive those painful suspicions anent Mr. Train which had perhaps almost died away. It is obvious that the moral of the Forth Bridge is lost upon him. Any man of ordinary sanity would understand that a nation which will spend six years in time and three millions in money, in order to bring Aberdeen an' hour nearer to London, is not to be beaten in any enterprise whatever which is worth carrying out. Whether under present circtimstances it be possible to travel from Tacoma and back again round the world within fifty days, is a matter of purely academic interest. That the feat could be easily effected by the running of specially fast trains for the land journey and of the swiftest modern steamers for the ocean transit, was known to most people before Mr. Train discovered the fact. Indeed, take the land and ocean mileage, divide them by the distance traversable per hour by a "Flying Dutchman " and an Atlantic greyhound respectively, and the time will be reduced to something considerably less; but this Vernesque trifling, however theoretically interesting, is of no more practical value than the rodomontade about the Kaiser-Bremen-William-Bismarck-Nord-Deutscher-Lloyd-George-Francis-Train combination, even with the Trans-Siberian railway route thrown in. There would be scarcely enough solid pudding to be gained by such an exploit to attract the German Company. As an advertisement, as an opportunity enabling a new line of steamers to exhibit their capabilities, it might have its uses, but the Norddeutscher Lloyd is too well established in the East by this time to require such a pufi; and in any case Mr. Train evidently had in view, not a spasmodic effort, but a permanent institution, and as such the undertaking would hardly recommend itself to any nation having a true commercial instinct. Now, itis doubtless a Jong time since we swept Van Tromp from the seas with his own vainglorious broom and compelled foreign ships to vail topmast and sail before the Cross of St. George, but so long as 78 per cent. of the tonnage passing through the Suez Canal is British, Britanuia's mercantile rule remains a solid fact, and her views as to the advisability and feasibility of this or that project are proportionably weighty. We may therefore reasonably anticipate that when Mr, Train arrives at Berlin with his proposal to play off the Norddeutscher Lloyd against the P. & O, and Vancouver lines, the levelheaded Germans will scarcely be prepared to accept with acclamation a scheme which has not appealed successfully, or, what is equivalent, has not appeared lent to us. They will remember what Mr, Train apparently forgets: that it is not in the spirit of enterprise that England can be said to be wanting. Given a legitimate occasion, and we rise to it as probably no other nation can, Is the Stirling Castle and her marvellous run from Shanghai to London so soon forgotten? Has he never heard how the Orient line, when they were bidding for the mail contract to Australia, used to perform the voyage to Melbourne in 3, 4 or even 5 days less than the P.& 0.? Must he be reminded that when the mail steamer carrying the answer of the United States to our demand for the surrender of Mason and Slidell arrived at Queenstown, the despatches were conveyed to London vie Dublin by special train and steamer at an average speed for the whole journey of about 54 miles an hour? Is the railway race from London to Edinburgh, when both the London and North Western and the Great Northern trains covered the distance inside eight hours and a half, so much a thing of the past that it no longer lingers in Mr. Train's memory, and has ceased to convey its lesson of possibilities no longer developed because they have not been found to pay? And if the Stirling Castle has had no successor in easily the attempt to beat the record; if the Orient steamers have subsided into a comfortable but by no means despicable jog-trot; if the American mails journey from Queenstown at a humdrum speed of merely 45 miles per hour; if the Euston directors are satisfied to land travellers in Edinburgh in a minimum time of 93 hours; and if no British Company or association of companies has thought it expedient to girdle the earth in fifty days, Mr. Train may rest assured that the several prevailing rates of speed are the rates which pay the best in the long rim and are no proofs of the decadence of either the mercantile enterprise or resources of England. The day may come, it doubtless will, when Mr. 'l'rain's vision will become incarnate reality, but we have no misgivings that the future greyhounds of the Pacific will fly any other flag than that borne by their Atlantic sisters, the pioneer flag of every sea, the Red Ensign of England's mercantile marine.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.