But advance was made not alone by utilizing the enormous stores of coal energy; the very fact that ad vance was thus made stimulated advance in other direc tions. It had been necessary to make new tools to suit altered conditions, so new tools came to be made to utilize such energy as man and his domestic animals possessed more profitably than had been possible previously. Tools had been made more and more efficient all through the ages, from the time man first used a stone or a stick instead of his own hand. After the Industrial Revolu tion the process was immensely extended in other :ands besides those of which we are speaking, but in no land has the process been so marked as in the United States. The lesson that machinery can be employed to use energy more economically has been applied to agriculture. The sickle has given place to the mechanical harvester ; the introduction of machinery has reduced the labour cost of sown crops by over £170,000,000 in the last fifty years. Between 1855 and 1894 the time of human labour required to produce one bushel of Indian corn on an average was reduced from four and a half hours to under three-quarters of an hour. Between 1830 and 1896 the time of human labour required to produce a bushel of wheat was reduced from three hours to ten minutes. The corn and the wheat are no less nourishing, but energy has been saved and men are set free to do things more worth doing.
With the construction of railways, too, organization is possible on a yet larger scale than in the Old World. Washington, central between the settlements in New England and Virginia, was naturally chosen as govern ing centre when all the population was on the eastern coasts, and naturally still remains the capital ; the possibility of its remaining the capital depends on the ease of access to the states of the centre and west. It was the making of the Canadian Pacific Railway that brought British Columbia into the Dominion of Canada, and it was other transcontinental railways that pre vented the growth of independent states on the Pacific coast. Nor is this all; this is only what has happened in every state in Europe, only it is on a larger scale. A new feature is that in North America the railways have made the towns. Except on the Atlantic coast, with its old civilization, railways have not been made to towns because they were important ; towns have grown up because railways, following lines of least resistance, have inevitably met at certain points, and there rather than elsewhere men have found it convenient to live.
In the United States, then, also, we see that the modern helots, slaves of the furnace, are supplying energy, and doing work on a great scale. Organization is on a great scale; saving is on a great scale. Even to a greater extent than in the Old World is man an engineer. And the energy that is saved is deliberately spent—some of it—in finding out how best to save more, not fortuitously, not accidentally, but by patient search.
In no other land is research of all kinds so lavishly endowed, if perchance, directly or indirectly, further advance may be made.
And with the rise of the United States to the position of a great Power a new condition appears in the world, or rather, the condition which Columbus made significant acquires a new significance. The world is round. If the world was round in the days of Columbus, then there was another way from the west of the OH World to the East. The world is round now, and the United States
lies between the west and the east of the Old World. The west of the United States is nearer to the east of Asia than is the west of Europe, and yet not so very much nearer. Look at a globe and try to realize the distance across the Pacific Ocean, especially from south east to north-west. It was this distance across the Pacific that prevented any real use being made of the western route from Europe to the Indies, so that till the rise of the United States the New World has been but a land of no great consequence, lying at some distance to the west of Europe.
The essential controls have been determined by the geographical conditions in the Old World. Within the great land of Euro-Asia lay the plain,steppe to the south, backed by forest and unnavigable ocean, now occupied by Russia, the great land power, but for long the home of pastoral nomads, ever emerging into the border lands. Round this plain, and partly separated from it by high plateaus or mountain chains, were the coastlands organ ized as the various states whose history we have traced, and to a great extent protected from the black peril by the barrier of the Sahara.
With the rise of the United States the distribution of the great masses of land on the round world has come to have further significance. The importance of Russia and that of the marginal lands remain; but there is something more. In the apparent disorderly distri bution of lands there is yet some order. Round the South Pole there is a great continent, round the North an ocean. Round the southern continent there is an unbroken ring of ocean, while round the Northern Ocean there is an almost unbroken ring of land; from the ring of land there run southward three tapering land areas, separated by three oceans tapering northward.
Partly owing to the fact that the greater proportion of land is thus in the Northern Hemisphere, it is in the Northern Hemisphere that there are those large areas of desert where the early civilizations began, and following on this that other civilizations have developed between 20° and 60° north latitude, with the most energetic of mankind north of 35° N. The Southern Hemisphere has neither such large desert areas nor such areas of land as have hitherto been suitable for settlement by men who have learned elsewhere how to save energy. We thus see that with the exception of a few isolated communities in the south of South America, in South Africa and in Australia, all those which matter lie on an almost continuous belt round a central area, which is unsuited for settlement because of cold. These communities, being what they are, naturally desire com munication with each other, and the rising of English North America—the States and Canada—to importance, thus makes it possible not merely to have a back and forth service across the Atlantic and across Euro-Asia, but to have a continuous circular service, in some parts better, in some parts worse, giving to the inhabitants of every place on this belt better facilities for movement at less expense than they would have if they were not on this belt. There are fewer termini and dead ends; every place is on the way to somewhere else.