Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/53



My great subject was the crowd of the future of the world's population. Nationalities would be merged in those days. But how were they all to be fed, how even to find foot-room? Supposing the food question solved in the direction indicated by Black, a very moderate rate of increase, such as that of the doubling of the numbers every third of a century, would give, in a few centuries hence, a thousand times the present population, and in a few fm-ther centuries a thousand times that again, and so on. Then, again, there was the sanitary question. What would be the health-condition with all this crowd? Here I rather prided myself on a project of the future, which was entirely my own, and which was suggested to my mind in the way I shall now describe.

Returning from business one afternoon, I came upon some little street Arabs, who were still sporting in the gutter with all the freedom of which our great Education Act has since happily deprived them. One of these children had a form and beauty so strikingly perfect, shining through all his rags and dirt, that I stood a while to muse over such striking social contrarieties; and while so engaged I developed a project which I was fain to put conspicuously into my forecast of our future. Suppose, as I argued, we were to gather together all such perfect forms of health and beauty, in order to bring up these nature-favoured persons in an educational and training way comparable with the other superiorities already theirs. Obviously we might have here the beginnings of a superior race, which might not only come to the