Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/249

 Anticipating, therefore, that many existing forms of restraint will have become obsolete because unnecessary, we may very fairly ask ourselves whether, in an improved moral and intellectual atmosphere, it will not have been found advisable to abolish other restraints and requisitions as a directly remedial measure. The suggestion may, at the moment, appear chimerical, but so must every intelligent anticipation of a coming time appear to anyone who approaches the subject without allowing for the difference of conditions, and conceives of changes which will take place so gradually as to be almost unperceived, as if they were to occur per saltum, without any process of slow moral preparation. So would nearly every social condition of the present age have appeared individually to a citizen of the world of 1800, if, possessing intelligence to foresee it, he lacked the imagination necessary to foresee the accompanying and subservient conditions. That public opinion should be so shocked by the execution of capital punishment, that only the most atrocious murders are thus punished—the sentence, where there is any real extenuation at all, being habitually commuted nowadays—is a condition which would hardly have suggested itself even to the most alert imaginations in an age where small thefts were constantly punished by death. Our sense of what may be called the accidental influences