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The Canadian Pacific Railway scheme was completed in 1887. It has a total length of at least 3,000 miles, starting from Quebec and finishing at Vancouver’s Island on the Pacific. Its marvellous success will also considerably change the general tenor of the Pacific even more than the Panama or Nicaragua scheme will do. An express train can cross in five days, while the voyage from Vancouver to Yokohama in Japan, would only occupy twelve days steaming at the rate of fourteen or fifteen knots an hour. From England the whole journey to Shanghai and Hong Kong by this route would take only thirty-four or thirty-five days, and Australia now has direct communication with the mother country through a sister colony.

Last of all, Japan would have much better communication with the European markets generally than is possible at the present time, if the English proposed^[17] mail steamers should run, and it is said that the Canadian Pacific route would bring Japan within twenty-six or twenty-seven days’ reach of England.