Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/231

 assertion of the true justice of that view, and sympathetic allusion to the fresh chance such justice afforded to the unhappy wife yet to retrieve the blasted prospects of her life, the learned judge, amidst the hardly suppressed applause of the whole court, pronounced for the divorce.

The term "International," three centuries earlier, was wont to call up chiefly a grim vision of class war and bloodshed, and the general upset of society. That term now carried a very different meaning. So soon as the various peoples of the civilized world had fully realized that all fears of mutual war were finally done with, a mutual trafficking, and mutual personal intercourse set in, with a cordiality, and upon a scale, which were altogether beyond precedent. Our young men, after completing their education, and just before settling down to life's regular vocation, would make a short visiting tour amongst neighbouring societies in Europe or across the Atlantic. Indeed they went, by-and-by, gradually much further afoot; for, during this century in particular, our Anglo-German race had almost everywhere overspread the world from equator to either pole, in their successful colonizing enterprise. These various outside visits were cordially reciprocated to us by the youths of the other countries.

Upon this practice there was gradually grafted another. The respective States began to issue, to their respective young excursionists, duly accrediting