The things we do!

We cannot imagine
two permanently dissociated or distantly associated temperate
civilizations on this globe, which is becoming smaller every day.
It was inevitable, perhaps, and happily inevitable, that the east-and-west
lines should be well established before the temperate zone should venture
into tropic lotus-lands again, and perhaps it was inevitable that the west
should eventually, even without the help of steam and steel, attach itself
to the east--even by streams of water.
Washington had hardly put off his uniform, after the peace of 1783, when
he was planning for a western trip, and his diary on the third day of that
trip of six hundred and eighty miles shows that his one object was to
obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the
eastern and the western waters. One of the kings of France said, when his
grandson was made king of Spain, "There are no longer any Pyrenees," and
Washington, when he saw the new republic forming, said, in effect, "There
must be no Alleghanies.


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