The President described the contrasted temperatures of similar latitudes in Europe and America, how England on the latitude of Labrador was warmer than New York which found its Adirondack mountains--chilled in the depth of winter to almost forty degrees below zero--on the same degree as southern France; itself the type and synonym of warmth. He made it clear how the thermal flood of warm waters upon the shores of Europe--heating the drifting airs above it till, laden with moisture, they too added their gifts of rain and warmth to Great Britain, and the shores of Scandinavia; how this Gulf Stream, a wayward impressionable wandering river pushing past Florida with a cubic capacity of seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in half a second of time, and, held in its fluctuating course by the laws of gravity, how this marvellous oceanic flood, controlled the material conditions of England’s greatness; grasped, as it were, in the filmy fingers of its webbed and spreading tides, its wealth, its maritime supremacy, its intellectual distinction, its domestic thrift, and sunny sweetness. And then the President ended, and Leacraft bent forward, gripped the railing before him with sudden fierceness, a knell strangely appalling sounded in his ears, a portent widely distracting and unreasonable drove the color from his cheeks. The President ended with these words: “The Gulf Stream whipped into violent activity by the south east trade winds beats impetuously upon the islands of the West Indies, washes the beaches of Central America, and whirls its spinning tides within the Gulf of Mexico, and then, repulsed by the continuous shore lines of North America, returns to Europe bearing its mantle of verdure to be thrown over the hills, the capes, the valleys the western edges and islands of the Old World. But now the barrier is gone. The Gulf Stream before the strong and rapacious winds is no longer turned aside by impossible walls of land but triumphantly sweeps into the Pacific, and with it vanishes the glory of England. For ourselves it means singular disaster though it may bring compensating changes. If England disappears as a world power we are robbed of a friend, we have lost a market. What words shall measure the moral meaning of the first, what revenues express the yearly increasing value of the latter. We stand on the threshold of a New Era.”