Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/115

 in the crowd of competitive views, lay in a judicious brevity. As time went on, and the field of scientific and business life took its due concurrent expansion, this brevity of expression, into which, in its particular department, the "Special Hansard" had graduated us, became a general feature of all society's many vocations, and thus enabled the advancing race to keep up with a breadth of knowledge, which, otherwise, must have been an attainment impossible alike to time and strength.

The old question as to whether the State should intervene in general progress, or leave the whole field to private enterprise, received a happy solution, after the nineteenth century, in the principle of Special Trusts, in which the State would originate and conduct certain classes of great and desirable projects, but without involving the country's government in pecuniary responsibility. Each such project was expected to clear its own cost eventually; and if not by ordinary reproduction, at any rate, in the final resort, by that natural increment of value, in a progressive country, through the mere efflux of time. Of course, therefore, anything to be attempted, in this promising and convenient way, must necessarily be only of a kind calculated for such a result. Many such works successively presented themselves; and thus grand and beneficial works, of a kind, or upon a scale, which private enterprise could hardly have even dreamt of, were duly entered upon, and,