Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/14

 The beginning of the twenty-first century will exhibit differences, when compared with our own day, which even the boldest imagination can hardly need to be restrained in conjecturing. The latter part of the nineteenth century was the age of electricity, just as the middle part was the age of steam. The first part of the twentieth century is evidently going to be the age of wave manipulation, of which wireless telegraphy, as we know it, is but the first infantile stirring.

What the developments promised {and they are already quite easily presageable) by wireless telegraphy will give us, and what they will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined; what their effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured even to hint at. Few things are more remarkable in the numerous and highly-varied experiments of vaticinatory fiction and more serious efforts of prognostication than the utter absence of any adequate attempt to forecast the future of the race itself. Social and political changes, the enormous differences which are certain to be effected in the manner of human life, have been from time to time more or less boldly imagined, and a couple of volumes of very able forecasts of the future have recently been published by a writer of singular vision and highly-trained scientific imagination. But it does not hitherto appear to have been at all