The bearing of these reflections upon the purpose in hand is not so much one of mere literary curiousness as one of commercial comparison. The logic of that time carried a large non sequitur. “The country intervening between the most western limits of civilization and the recently settled territories of the Pacific,” says the same early historian, “is confessedly little known.” The empire of the Middle West was not dreamed of. This is what the new road was to do: “Instead of weary months of travel around the capes of Africa and South America, less than a month will suffice to transport the teas and silks of China, the coffee and the spices of Java and Ceylon, to the great Atlantic cities, thence to be distributed as from the world’s depot to the nations of Europe. But not only will this new mode of transit take to itself the best and most remunerative part of the traffic now existing between eastern Asia and Christendom, but it will also create a new traffic, compared with which the trade now existing will bear almost no comparison. “Instead of here and there a seaport in China holding commercial relations with America, this nearness of access to the best markets of the world will stimulate into an unprecedented activity the raising of all agricultural products, the manufacture of all goods and wares, and the disinterring of all the mineral resources which the three hundred millions of China can furnish us, at a cheaper rate than we can obtain them elsewhere. Japan, with a population almost double our own, now shut out from all intercourse with the rest of the world, must soon be forced by the strength of circumstances to welcome to her ports the merchant fleets of other nations, anxious and eager to distribute to the wide world the rich products of her soil, her climate, and her domestic industry. The tropical fruitfulness of the over-populated islands of the Eastern Archipelago will also pour, in increased abundance, the rich spices of their balmy breezes through this new and rapid conduit.” Not so bad was this flowery prophecy, though its fulfilment was to run over into another century, and to fall subsequent to a still greater industrial phenomenon, the gourd-like maturing of the trans-Missouri region.[52] This rapid development of the interior region of America was not foreseen by the wisest of the prophets of fifty years ago. Yet unspeakably swift and startling as it has been, it was, after all, the product of an arrested growth, of an advancement upon lines substantially different from those on which it was originally and naturally projected.