Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/267

 centuries, made so much still greater progress. The narrowing of the evaporable surface everywhere had diminished everywhere the old violence of all our meteorologic forces. Already the world was, to an appreciable degree, freed of dark, heavy cloud masses, heavy and protracted rains, violent wind storms, and angry degrees of thunder and lightning. We, in the twenty-ninth century, have still much further triumphed over these common disturbers of the peace of the past, which have indeed no longer even the pretence of agricultural wants for their uncomfortable, inconvenient, business-hindering, and ladies-bonnet-ruining infliction. Who, I say, would ever prefer to go back to those old ways and freaks of the weather, from whose extremes we have happily now been so thoroughly freed?

Let us look back, for just a passing moment, upon our Old England, now about to expire as a separate and distinctive national existence, and to be swallowed up in that progress of the world to which she herself, after planting her energetic sons far and wide over its surface, had most prominently contributed, thus giving place to that "larger Britain," as she might now claim to call the entire world. The last premier of this Old England stands before us, to make his opening address to the venerable Wittenagemot of his age and country. There still survived, in form, the old Commonwealth administration of a premier and his ministry, responsible to a representative Parliament. But otherwise the political drama had materi-