Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/113

 artificially induced, the phenomenon called caisson-disease occasions practical difficulty. But the mere fact of an achievement being almost inconceivable in the light of present knowledge and invention must not be allowed to put a clog upon a forecast of what next century may attain It is a hypothesis which the reader has been invited to accept, not merely that discovery and invention will go on, but that they will go at a constantly-increasing pace. We must not, therefore, allow what may well seem, at the present day, insuperable engineering difficulties to forbid the belief that the undiscovered wealth of the earth below the sea will be tapped for the benefit of the new age. What minerals may lie there, a rich heirloom for the coming time, we can but roughly imagine. But enterprise and the world's necessities will spur us on to search them out, until the new people, deriving like a fresh Antæus constant stores of strength from Mother Earth, will enter into possessions which must vastly relieve their necessities. Individual enterprise will solve the problems and reap its store of profits. But the ocean is no-man's land, and the people—perhaps a world-people, for this purpose at least not subdivided into antagonistic communities—will beyond doubt take toll, for the relief of general taxation, from the earnings of the new mineralogy.