Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/100

 war, and of the national waste of a professional soldiery; and, more perhaps than aught else, the rapid healthy increase of intelligent people, under the gradual but steady solution of the food question, together with the fact that the head and hand of woman, when she had secured all her rights, were in their various ways as active for progress as those of the man,—had altogether a most powerful and quite unprecedented after-effect on the advance and well-being of our people. After a brief sketch of each of the more prominent of these various causes, I purpose to take the general progress century by century. I shall first attend mainly to that of our own country and people, until the time when our previously separate national interests have merged finally into that of the whole advancing world at large. We enter upon this great change with the last half of our retrospect; after which we have to deal with that entire world which then began to assume its present grand aspect of one homogeneous society and substantially of one speech.

Let me here parenthetically remark, that it is indeed only from old association, and from the additional circumstance that both my residence and my business location are still in the old ancestral quarters of a good thousand years ago, that I find myself still keeping up the exploded anomaly of speaking and thinking of my people and my country, as though these were a still existing distinction in the world.

"Old England" has now finally disappeared from the earth, alike in her distinctive nationality, as in her physical islandic outlines of once familiar seacoast and scenery. In the contest of races which