Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/160

 art or science of dwelling-house, warehouse, or factory structure had quickly passed out of all its old dilatory, and other variously backward and costly ways. That once insoluble old question of healthily and comfortably housing "the poorer classes"—if indeed we could so continue to speak of the well-off masses of the people of the twentieth century—was thenceforward a thing to be accomplished almost at once, as we may presently have occasion to see, and that not by mere thousands of dwellings at a time, but by millions, as required under the improving dispensations of those days.

Another striking feature of change and improvement, which afterwards left its mark largely alike over town and country, was that of the light glass roof, thrown over our streets, by way of protection from the chill air and weeping skies of our Old England climate. This great step in the direction of business convenience, as well as social comfort and resource, was assisted by other concurrent circumstances. For example, we had already begun to dispense with the cumbrous and costly live quadruped to help our locomotion, and to substitute for it the more cleanly and manageable life-electric. Consequently, unlike Paddy and his pig of old, in common occupation of the home, we had no quadrupedal company even beneath the ampler area of our new glassy sky, and the feature of stables, as well as street manure, had alike vanished. The rapid substitution of electricity for steam, in our locomotive and other uses, was further in the same acceptably cleanly direction; and not less marked in the same way was our chemical progress, which was already dealing, promptly and