Year: 1871



 It is amusing (says, the London Spectator) to witness the cheerful alacrity with which engineers are ever proposing grand schemes to bridge over the distance on our globe, and the willingness with which the public give ear to them. Whether it be to tunnel through the Alps, or under the Straits of Dover, or cut canals through the Isthmuses which connect the northern and southern halves of the Old and New world, or lay telegraph cables under the Atlantic and Pacific, there is apparently no limit to the fertility of the engineering mind, or the mingled awe and delight with which the majority of the people read of the success sive schemes which are ventilated. At the present moment the run is upon railroads to India, for which the fullness of time seems to have come.

 The cutting of the Suez Canal lately stirred the popular imagination on the sub- ject of Eastern communications, and now the opening of the Mont Cenis tunnel has not only had a similar influence, but it

 

 manner through railway communication with an extreme southeastern point in Europe, on the direct road to India. It is natural, therefore, that engineers and the public should be alike provoked by the long interval interpose6 between Western Europe and the East by the scantily peo- pied regions of the Turkish and Persian empires. which misgoyernment and inca pacity of race have prevented from being filled up. The missing link is perhaps greater than that which was lately filled up between the Missouri and the Pacific but the result, as these matters are judged with all the East on one side, and all Europe on the other, will be porportionally grea- ter, and accordingly the schemes produced are in unexampled abundance.

 To begin with, there are the old propo- sals for Euphrates Valley Railway, to connect the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and shorten by week the present overland journey between London and India. But these are the most moderate proposals. Constantinople in year or two will be connected with the European system, and there are about half dozen schemes to join Constantinople with India, some of them to make Euphrates Valley line section of the highway to India, and others to run through the north of Asia Minor and Persia, passing through the Persian capital of Teheran, and through Herat and Candahar on the line by which we have been taught to expect the future invasion of India by Russia, in which so many people believe. There is even a third class of schemes by which India is to be reached through Russia, the Russians pushing branch from their southern rail- ways across the Caucasus, and so giving us a road to Teheran by which we may get 10 India as already described.

 And as if all these were not enough, we have grand scheme for 8 railway starting eastward from Trieste, skirting the Tur- klsh coast of the Adriatlc, and finally eros sing the Salonica, from which there would be short sea passage across the Levant, and then railway to India on the route of the Euphrates Valley line, to be continued along the coast to Kurrachee. Mrs. Bur- ton has also come forward with proposal this week, to vary the ordinary routes sug- gested for the Euphrates Valley line by a deviation which would develop Syria, and restore Baalbek and Palmyra to their old importance.

 Such is meagre list of the competing projects which are offered, the very chea- pest to cost between eight and ten millions, the most ambitious, forty millions, and the average, which are strictly limited to the construction of complete railway between Constantinople and India, between twenty and thirty millions.