Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great deal faster--now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighborhood of both isthmuses exist of such junction having existed, in what we are pleased to designate "barbarous" ages. Does nature present insurmountable engineering difficulties to the Panama scheme? By no means: for after the Croton aqueduct, our own railway tunneling, and the Britannia tubular bridge, engineering difficulties have become obsolete. Are the levels of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, which should be joined, so different, that if one were admitted the fall would inundate the surrounding country? Not at all. Hear Humboldt on these points. Forty years ago he declared it to be his firm opinion that "the Isthmus of Panama is suited to the formation of an oceanic canal--one with fewer sluices than the Caledonian Canal--capable of affording an unimpeded passage, at all seasons of the year, to vessels of that class which sail between New York and Liverpool, and between Chili and California." In the recent edition of his "Views of Nature," he "sees no reason to alter the views he has always entertained on this subject." Engineers, both British and American, have confirmed this opinion by actual survey. As, then, combination of British skill, capital, and energy, with that of the most "go-ahead" people upon earth, have been dormant, whence the secret of the delay? The answer at once allays astonishment: Till the present time, the speculation would not have "paid."