“In a commercial point of view, the advantages would be still more considerable: British India contains a population of 150,000,000, including, with the subjects of the British Crown, its allies and tributaries. China does not contain less than 350,000,000 of inhabitants: to say nothing of the other rich and populous countries of the East. Let us suppose that in consequence of the progress and developement of commerce, each Indian and Chinese should augment his outlay in the purchase of English produce by one shilling; this modification alone, insignificant as it appears, would augment the amount of exports by 25,000,000. Now is it not evident that the opening of the Maritime Canal will greatly facilitate commercial relations, and tend to lower the price of all merchandize? the 500,000,000 of human beings peopling India and China are still sunk in ignorance and superstition. With steam navigation, which will be developed beyond all conception by the opening of the Canal, these people, brought into daily communication with European ideas, will enter by degrees into the current of science and civilization.” We will terminate these quotations by an extract from a very remarkable work published in the “Papers for the People,” inserted in the _Revue Britannique_ (for 1852), and in which the cutting through the Isthmus is regarded as a practical solution of the maintenance of the British power in India. We read there:—“If in spite of the concourse of several adverse circumstances, we firmly believe that our country will be able to effect the union of the two Seas, it is because this measure will soon become imperiously necessary for the maintenance of our empire ... all nations would find immense advantage in the creation of a new route opened to navigation; this evident advantage, offered to the European states nearer to Africa, has even been seriously adduced as a fit argument to divert England from an enterprise, the result of which might be problematical. We encounter here one of the old distrusts of that worn-out theory, that miserable tissue of mistakes that took upon itself to teach, that a people is only rich and flourishing in proportion as its neighbours are indigent and unfortunate. Doubtless the countries of Europe nearest to the East will derive a considerable profit from the opening of the Isthmus of Suez, but our egotism ought to find therein a motive for satisfaction; for we cannot be ignorant of the fact, that the developement of commerce, whatever the means employed, always ends by bringing the better part of the profits to the most intelligent and most numerous firms. For our own part, such is our belief. England, and more than one other nation by its example, appear to us called to great works which will throw into shade the most striking deeds of history. Among these works of the future, it appears to us that the cutting through the Isthmuses of Panama and Suez stand in the first rank, and which