The Suez Canal can boast of having achieved many triumphs. It has abridged time and space in a way and to an extent that no other enterprise has ever before done in the history of the world. It has brought India and Australasia almost within half their former distance of Europe. It has revolutionised the shipping trade of the world. It has brought about remarkable changes in the values of Eastern produce. It has greatly reduced the cost of transport, and it has placed at the disposal of England, France, and Egypt a source of revenue which in its steady upward growth may properly be described as an El Dorado. But, after all, there is one of the phases of this remarkable work which is entitled to quite as much attention as any of these, although the world in general hears less about it. The canal gave an enormous impetus to engineering invention, skill, and enterprise, the effects of which have since then been felt in a hundred different works undertaken and carried out for the good of mankind. The appliances with which the canal was eventually completed were, for the most part, designed specially for the purpose. Until then, no such machinery was available. But the opportunity once found, the men were found who could utilise it. A description of the numerous different descriptions of elevators, dredgers, inclined planes, engines, and other appliances employed at Suez would fill a large volume. Compare some of these mighty machines, with their weight of 500 or 600 tons,[150] and extracting at the rate of a million and a half cubic feet of earth per month, with the _Couffins_, or rude Arab baskets, used by the native fellaheen, by whom the work was begun in 1860![151] The contrast represents the void that divides barbarism from civilisation. The effect of the opening of the Suez Canal has been to reduce the distance between England and the Australian and Indian possessions of the British Crown by distances varying from 545 to 4393 nautical miles, the greatest saving having occurred in the case of the voyage to Bombay. The voyage to India, China, and Australia has been so much shortened that some of the most important of the ports of those possessions are now reached in little more than one half the time that was formerly taken up by the voyage round the Cape.[152] The total cost of the Suez Canal at the end of 1870 was placed on the company’s balance-sheet for that year at 16,613,000_l._[153] At the end of 1886 this amount had swollen, with various items of expenditure incurred in the interval, to 19,782,000_l._ Of the former amount only 11,653,000_l._ were expended in the work of construction proper.