The liberal offer that came from the South American States received the utmost The Pope Accepts the Offer. attention from the Papal authorities. To withdraw from that ancient city seemed like the uprooting of all traditions. The irreligious were prone to make merry over the proposition, predicting with strange irreverence, that in Rio Janeiro the Pope would feel like a cat in a strange garret. But with such innuendoes we have nothing in common. Let history proceed undisturbed in its course.
It required a heroic sacrifice to give up Rome, filled with the most precious historic memories, a city in which lies enshrined the dust of St. Peter’s successors. This step meant the abandonment of that magnificent cathedral, which in 1999 still formed an aureole of glory about the Eternal City. But Rome in 1945 was no longer a safe tabernacle for the Papacy. Its mobs were unbridled in their license. The person of the Pontiff was no longer safe within the walls of the Vatican. The Italian government proved to be an abettor, if not an instigator, of these outrages.
With a dark, threatening cloud hovering over the throne of St. Peter in Europe, and All Headed for the West. on the other hand, bright skies and a most alluring and tempting prospect eagerly awaiting its transferment to Rio de Janeiro, after long hesitation and endless Conclaves, the Sacred College of Cardinals, (the Pope concurring,) gave its official sanction in 1945 to the removal of the Papal See to the Western Hemisphere, under the ægis of the great American Constitution, the noblest document ever written by the fallible pen of man, a charter which protects and defends all who are worthy and they who seek its sheltering folds.
CHAPTER XI.
England’s Domain in 1999.
England Rules Supreme in Africa in 1999. Electric Railroads Built by American Engineers Cover the Dark Continent. France Suffers Two Waterloos. England’s Rule in India Unshaken in the Twentieth Century.
In 1999 England was the ruler of Africa and her domain over the Dark Continent was indisputable. From the Delta of the Nile to Cape Town, from Abyssinia to Liberia, the British lion was free to roam and roar throughout the enormous, heart-shaped African continent. From Alexandria to Cape Town became, in 1999, a comparatively short journey over the electric railroads which in that year traversed the entire length of the Nile basin, with important stations at Berber and Khartoum, Uganda, Zambo to Pretoria, thence to the Terminal of the roads at Cape Town. This electric railroad through the Nile basin, the lake regions and heart of the African continent, was completed and in operation in 1930, after a sacrifice in its construction It Reduced the Census. of 19,000 lives and an outlay of $152,000,000. It proved to be, however, the backbone of Africa, the vertebral column from which scores of other electric railroad branches reached out both east and west, like the ribs of a mastodon.
THE BEST OF FRIENDS.