Thus we have seen the steamship arrive at a stage very far from being merely experimental. We have watched her gradually grow from her infancy, when she was good only as a tug or river craft, until now she has shown in the enthusiasm of her youth that she can stride across the Atlantic. It will be our duty in the following chapter to indicate how she came to be treated with entire confidence, and to take her part in the regular routine of the world’s work. CHAPTER IV THE INAUGURATION OF THE LINER It was not to be thought that the achievements which we chronicled at the end of the preceding chapter would remain without their immediate results. If such small vessels as the _Sirius_, propelled by steam, could cross the Atlantic and return safe and sound; if still more easily the _Great Western_ had been able to perform the feat and to show a substantial return on the capital laid out, surely there was an assured future for steamship enterprise. “What man has done, man can do,” is an old proverb, the application of which has led to the founding of those mighty, excellently equipped fleets which have transformed the trackless, desolate North Atlantic into a busy thoroughfare, along whose fixed routes every day of the year are carried thousands of passengers and tons of merchandise from one continent to the other. Although nowadays there is scarcely a corner of the world to which a regular line of steamships does not run, yet it is the North Atlantic that has always been the scene of the greatest enterprise in steamship development. We could find plenty of reasons for this if we cared to inquire into the matter. It was not until the advent of the transatlantic steamship that all the possibilities of the Tudor voyages and discoveries began to be appreciated fully. A continent, like a single country, flourishes not merely by its produce of wealth, but by its exchange thereof. So long as it is separated by thousands of miles, every fathom of which is fraught with danger and has to be traversed by sailing ships whose arrival may be weeks or months late, which may, in fact, never arrive at all, a tight restriction is kept on the exchange of wealth; stagnation ensues, people travel as little as possible, and remain ignorant in their own narrow provincialism. Whereas, to-day, they take every possible advantage of travel, of voyaging the world over, not merely to exchange wealth but to exchange ideas, to add to their knowledge, to wipe out their provincialism. For this we must thank the coming of the liner.