the Pacific equidistant from the two cities named would pass, roughly,
by Yokohama, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Melbourne, or along the coasts
of Japan, China, and eastern Australia,--Liverpool, in this case,
using the Suez Canal, and New York that of Nicaragua. In short, the
line of equidistance would be shifted from the eastern shore of the
Pacific to its western coast, and all points of that ocean east of
Japan, China, and Australia--for example, the Hawaiian Islands--would
be nearer to New York than to Liverpool.

A recent British writer has calculated that about one-eighth of the
existing trade of the British Islands would be affected unfavorably by
the competition thus introduced. But this result, though a matter of
national concern, is political only in so far as commercial prosperity
or adversity modifies a nation's current history; that is, indirectly.
The principal questions affecting the integrity or security of the
British Empire are not involved seriously, for almost all of its
component parts lie within the regions whose mutual bond of union and
shortest line of approach are the Suez Canal. Nowhere has Great
Britain so little territory at stake, nowhere has she such scanty
possessions, as in the eastern Pacific, upon whose relations to the
world at large, and to ourselves in particular, the Isthmian Canal
will exert the greatest influence.

The chief political result of the Isthmian Canal will be to bring our
Pacific coast nearer, not only to our Atlantic seaboard, but also to
the great navies of Europe. Therefore, while the commercial gain,
through an uninterrupted water carriage, will be large, and is clearly
indicated by the acrimony with which a leading journal, apparently in
the interest of the great transcontinental roads, has lately
maintained the singular assertion that water transit is obsolete as