Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/84

 Whilst we are now sailing homewards, after the satisfactory completion of our home business tour, let me say a few words on the past, present, and future of the great provision trade, that trade which has been in our honoured family for a full thousand years, and which, I flatter myself, I not only thoroughly understand, but which I have, in my day and turn, helped to advance and extend, until my worthy old ancestor of these ten centuries retrospect, who began it, could hardly by possibility recognize even one single feature of its modern aspect.

Going back, then, these ten centuries, we find the world's surface still only very partially occupied by man; so that it was not until two or three centuries nearer to our own crowded time that increasing population began really to jeopardize the usual modes of the old food-supply, by threatening to require, for mere human elbow-room, all the surface space previously required and devoted to natural food-raising. But all this time the steady progress in chemistry had been carrying us more or less into laboratorial organic production, so that certain articles, usable as food, began to stream steadily forth from the laboratory into the provision market. These articles at first were not much relished, or found to be particularly savoury, their raw new sawdusty sort of flavour keeping them from many a table, although, as I firmly believe, and looking to after experience, mere prejudice had much to say in the matter. But, however this may have been, the battle had not gone on very long, between