Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/214



We look back, continued the president, upon more than a century of the life of an universally educated people. What wondrous advance since the end of the nineteenth century! Then, indeed, was the day of small things compared with now. But probably our great grandchildren, a century hence, may find equal cause, in their own still greater progress, to speak alike disparagingly of our day. Comparing the actual present with the actual past, no feature is more striking, or more inspiring, than the great increase of our population. On this question much speculative guess-work of the past has been set entirely at rest by the facts of the present. We do not starve in England, although our country is already far on to being covered with human beings and dwelling houses, instead of presenting the open fields of preceding centuries. America and Australasia pour in upon us ample food supply, conveyed quickly and cheaply in the huge shipping of our time.

A vast and busy mass steps now to the front of society. There is no longer the feature of a hereditary poor class or hereditary lower class, any more than of a hereditary upper class. The lower class of to-day is the aggregate of individuals who fall comparatively short in ability, industry, and character. The universal activity, alike of hand and mind, in our great populations, gives us our unprecedented pace of progress. That progress takes remarkable directions, as, for instance, in our practice, now extending over all the country, of interposing the protection of a glass