Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/136

 highly imperfect measure of quarantine and a period of muzzling (from which, on no evident ground except that it would interfere with the amusements of the governing class to include them, sporting dogs were excluded), apparently banished hydrophobia from Great Britain. If it prove to be the case that just as hydrophobia cannot arise spontaneously, but requires to be "started" by the entry into the blood of an animal of an existing infection, other infective diseases require pre-existing disease before they can arise, we may get rid of them altogether. The dream may appear a wild one. But it is not wilder than the dreams of a thinker who anticipated any one of a hundred common facts of to-day must have appeared to our great-great-grandfathers.

It is, of course, not to be supposed that disease can altogether be banished from a world so highly artificial as that of the next century will be. Undoubtedly the growth of sanitary science and the knowledge of the larger facts of hygiene, which is only now beginning to dawn upon us, will have a great