Page:'Tis Sixty Years Since.djvu/47

Rh tale. A few years only back, every Carolinian rode to town, and the motor was unknown. A single illustrative example, this could be duplicated in innumerable ways everywhere and in all walks of life.

The result is obvious, and was inevitable. Entered on a new phase of existence, the world is not as it was in the days of Columbus, when a single new continent was discovered containing in it what we would now regard as a limited accumulation of the precious metals. It is, on the contrary, as if, in the language of Dr. Johnson, "the potentiality of wealth" had been revealed "beyond the dreams of avarice"; together with not one or two, but a dozen continents, the existence and secrets of which are suddenly laid bare. The Applied Sciences have been the magicians,—not Protection or the Currency.

And still scientists are continually dinning in our ears the question whether this state of affairs is going to continue,—whether the era of disturbance has reached its limit! I hold such a question to be little short of childish. That era has not reached its limits, nor has it even approximated those limits. On the contrary, we have just entered on the uncharted sea. We know what the last thirty years have brought about as the result of the agencies at work; but as yet we can only dimly dream of what the next sixty years are destined to see brought about. Imagination staggers at the suggestion.

What, then, has been of this the inevitable consequence,—the consequence which even the blindest should have