Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/115

 and it is conceivable that a use may be found for the rarer among them, which could only be obtained in satisfactory quantities by reducing to dryness huge amounts of water. And potable or spring waters will perhaps be too precious a commodity to be consumed unnecessarily. Distilled water could no doubt be used for drinking purposes, and bacteriologically it is of course unexceptionable; but there are certain objections to it, and though these may doubtless be overcome, natural waters have a value which cannot be ignored.

Thus the oceans of the world, as yet mere watery deserts, useful to hardly a calculable percentage of the people (and then only at the expense of the rest) will have become the world's inheritance, and its hoarded wealth will stave off the time—whose coming we must not ignore—when our world-capital begins to be exhausted. For that time must come. We are living upon the hoards which the womb of our mother the earth has borne to our father the sun. But our mother is, in respect at all events of mineral wealth, past the age of conception; and every century brings us more rapidly near to the time when we shall, like spendthrifts, have lived out our capital. Already the end of coal is in sight. When, at the end of a vista however long, we begin to be able to foresee the exhaustion of other minerals, we shall face a problem appalling in