Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/215

 roof between us and our too often wet, cold, and inhospitable skies. And this practice, which is extending also outside of us, is already mitigating the conditions and increasing the resources of life in the world's higher latitudes. There is already, in fact, the promise of population literally from pole to pole. We have long ago found our way, in mere geographical progress, to either pole, and countless travellers have poised themselves in imagination exactly upon either axial extremity beneath their feet. The question approaches of even a crowded permanent residence in such regions, when our race, in years or centuries to come, has been still more crowded out of the more temperate latitudes.

Another remarkable direction of modern progress is that of the land into the sea. We have, most effectually, in this respect, turned the tables upon our old enemy. We are now everywhere busy filling up our foreshores, estuaries, and ocean shallows. Already we have, in this way, added thousands of square miles to too narrow Old England. Already the spacious and once troublesome and dangerous sandbanks of the Thames' mouth are our national terra firma, and are being covered with warehouses and shops, mansions and small gardens. Already we have bridged the comparatively shallow water between south-west Scotland and north-east Ireland. Already our great neighbours of Germany and France, extending now, as they respectively do, over little Holland and little Belgium of old time, co-operate powerfully with us towards a future land junction, by filling up the North Sea shallows. Already, in this way, have we a broad dam, with its multiple-lined railway, con-