of Asia to Australasia, and its western selvage westward from the west
coasts of Europe and Africa to the west coasts of North and South
America, had been still, in effect, just as flat and as finite as ever. It
had merely been tied to the circumference of the globe, as if it had been
an oblong strip of cloth, by a skein of threads attaching its eastern and
western selvages to one another across the breadth of the Pacific; and,
even when these threads had been drawn tight enough to convert the
oblong strip into a band in the shape of an armlet by bringing the
two selvages together, a tell-tale suture had remained visible as an
International Date-Line intersecting the Pacific Ocean along a tracee
which followed, with some local variations, the iSoth meridian of
longitude.

The establishment of this International Date-Line in A JD. 1884* had
borne witness to two contemporary facts of human geography. On the
one hand a circum-global maritime traffic-belt had now come to be
sufficiently frequented to demand a global adjustment between the now
contiguous extremities of a longitudinal series of regionally differentiated
time-zones that could not extend in a continuous chain round the entire
circumference of the globe without there being a chronornerrical dis-
crepancy, of the time-length of twenty-four hours, between the respec-
tive timings of the first and the last zone in the series at the line along
which these two extremities now adjoined one another. On the other
hand the Pacific Ocean had continued still to be decidedly the least-
frequented section of a maritime traffic-belt that had come to encircle
the globe by expanding eastward and westward simultaneously from a
base-line along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe; and for this reason
the heart of the Pacific had proved to be the least inconvenient locus on
the traversable face of the globe for a conventional line at which west-
bound travellers would add to, and east-bound travellers subtract from,
their time-reckoning the twenty-four hours that, at some line or other,
must be added or subtracted, according to the direction of the voyage,
in order to cancel an inevitable twenty-four hours* discrepancy between
necessarily contiguous extremities of a circurn-global belt of differential
time-zones.

Meanwhile, an Oikoumengtbat had become round on the explorational
plane in AJ>. 1522, and on the chronometrical plane in A.D. 1884, had
remained flat and finite on the strategico-political plane till A J>, 1941;
for neither the passage of the Pacific on a voyage of exploration nor even
the subsequent establishment of regularly frequented Transpacific
traffic-lanes for merchant-ships had availed to reduce the Pacific to the
dimensions of a basin in which navies based on opposite sides of its rim
could manage to meet and fight. The rum of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries had seen this great Pacific gulf, breaking the continuity of the
strategic map of a Westernizing World, still fixed—to all appearance as
firmly as ever—in the locus of the International Date-lane; and a tacit
assumption that the gulf not only was, but also would remain, an im-
passable one had been the common presupposition, on a fundamental
point of fact, underlying the agreements reached at the Washington

1 At the International Meridian Conference held ia AJO. 1884 at Washington, D.C.