Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/101

 has been going actively on for the most part of the past thousand years, and in "the survival of the fittest," we English, along with the races kindred to us, have everywhere carried the day, and everywhere all others have been crowded off the world's too narrow surface. The French and German tongues, the Russian and Chinese, all lingered more or less in a protracted fight for dominancy or for life, while John Chinaman's prolific race was amongst the very last to succumb to the universal intrusion of our vigorous section of the white skins. The conjoined British and American Empires had at last everywhere predominated, to overspread our earth with the English speech and the Kelto-German races.

When we consider that the world, just as it is to-day, when we are upon the verge of the thirtieth century of our era, has considerably over a million times more people than it was possessed of when we were just upon the twentieth century, a thousand years ago, and that all this multitude is not only kept alive, but is even prosperous and comfortable throughout besides, as well as everywhere busy as bees over the earth's surface, both above and below ground, we cannot fail, in view of such a lively throng of working heads and hands, to be aware of, at any rate, one grand cause of our progress during the interval I am about to survey. Old prophetic Malthus, as things have turned out, sounded quite a false alarm, with his fears for the food-supply as against the population