Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/271

 condition, which has at last dispensed with all that imaginative sort of thing, so soon as it came in the way of people's more solid interests and wants. The ocean shallows had already, as we have said before, been filled up, partly by the levelling of the old hills, and partly by subterranean excavation. A goodly proportion of people, who had been crowded off the surface, in what was, then, at least, deemed to be crowding—had gradually taken to subterranean life. But there had not then, by any means, arisen that dense mass of layer upon layer, in downward succession, which now characterizes our subterranean existence.

Next, in our premier's address, came the food question. How are all the people off in that respect at this time? Indeed, the time in question was not more one of the political transition we have alluded to, than of a transition economic, and, in the most literal sense, corporeal; for the last remnants of ploughs and spades had already been surrendered as things of the past, and we at length depended entirely on the chemical laboratory for our food. And truly, in spite of occasional longings for the old flesh-pots of Egypt, a very good and sure source of supply it has proved to be, say I, speaking of it five centuries further on; and one also that has elevated our great provision trade out of the tedious and costly delay and the unsavoury dirt of the natural processes of the old ways of it, into the summary action and cleanly processes of the ways chemical.

People had not yet, indeed, by that time, opened the more modern chapter of doubts and fears about the due supply of phosphates and other indispensables