_[27] of the journey, and two, suppose, for getting
up a public meeting, composed a cycle of _ten_ before an act received
its commentary, before a speech received its refutation, or an appeal
its damnatory answer. What was the consequence? The sound was
disconnected from its echo, the kick was severed from the
recalcitration, the '_Take you this!_' was unlinked from the '_And take
you that!_' Vengeance was defeated, and sympathy dissolved into the air.
But now mark the difference. A meeting on Monday in Liverpool is by
possibility reported in the London _Standard_ of Monday evening. On
Tuesday, the splendid merchant, suppose his name were Thomas Sands, who
had just sent a vibration through all the pulses of Liverpool, of
Manchester, of Warrington, sees this great rolling fire (which hardly
yet has reached his own outlying neighbourhoods) taken up afar off,
redoubled, multiplied, peal after peal, through the vast artilleries of
London. Back comes rolling upon him the smoke and the thunder--the
defiance to the slanderer and the warning to the offender--groans that
have been extorted from wounded honour, aspirations rising from the
fervent heart--truth that had been hidden, wisdom that challenged
co-operation.

And thus it is that all the nation, thus 'all that mighty heart,'
through nine hundred miles of space, from Sutherlandshire by London to
the myrtle climate of Cornwall, has become and is ever more becoming one
infinite harp, swept by the same breeze of sentiment, reverberating the
same sympathies

'Here, there, and in all places at one time.'[28]

Time, therefore, that ancient enemy of man and his frail purposes, how
potent an ally has it become in combination with great mechanic changes!
Many an imperfect hemisphere of thought, action, desire, that could not
heretofore unite with its corresponding hemisphere, because separated by
ten or fourteen days of suspense, now moves electrically to its
integration, hurries to its complement, realizes its orbicular
perfection, spherical completion, through that simple series of
improvements which to man have given the wings and _talaria_ of Gods,
for the heralds have dimly suggested a future rivalship with the
velocities of light, and even now have inaugurated a race between the
child of mortality and the North Wind.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] 'The _diaulos_ of the journey.' We recommend to the amateur in
words this Greek phrase, which expresses by one word an egress linke