Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/24

 to foresee something of what will become of man during the next age.

We have here the limits of such an inquiry as the present. Placing the end of the age of electricity at provisionally about a hundred years hence (but it is quite conceivable that the rate of progress may overtake it earlier and shut the door on conjecture) it is possible to forecast, not indeed with certainty, but with a measure of imaginative probability, what will happen as the resources of electricity are developed and the other material amenities of the world are worked along the line of natural progress. So far as the light of analogy can point the way the reader is invited on a sort of conjectural journey. Of the developments of the moral ideas of man likely to be determined, not so much by the coming change in his material environment, as by the evolution of inner forces already at work, I propose to say something at the end of the book. In the meantime, the probable material changes in the next hundred years (or less, according to the rate of our progress) in various departments of life will be the subject of some intermediate conjectures.