Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/161

Rh of Nature may be discovered, and the requisite mechanism invented, by which to evade the inevitable loss of the larger part of that energy when developed by our present thermo-dynamic machines, and thus to secure the greater part as actually utilized, as useful power. The perfection of our machinery by improvement of details by our later inventors and the production of new and still more wonderfully productive machines, automatic and labor-multiplying, will as certainly continue, and in some fields is likely to astonish us, callous as we have become to these marvels, quite as much as were our parents surprised by the inventions of the last generations. Coöperation of labor, of capital, of manufacturing organizations, will necessarily go on, and the 'captains of industry' will have continually larger and larger armies and greater and greater tasks, and we shall have generals, as well as colonels and captains and subordinates, in the vast armies of united workers of the coming century.

We shall secure a liberal supply of this world's good things by a reasonable day's labor on the part of the humblest, wealth in abundance in repayment for superior talent, industry and forethought, and comfort and a healthful and wholesome life, a happy life, will be assured to all who choose to make the most and best of opportunity, including the wealthy, whose opportunities will be readily found in the promotion of higher learning, of nobler charities and of more generous care of the physically and intellectually lame and halt and blind. We shall increase the speed of our fast trains, cross the Atlantic in less time, transport the food and clothing and wealth of the world more cheaply, and very possibly add to the fields of invention and the practically available means of transportation the long-looked-for department of aeronautics and aërodromics. We have conquered the land and the water; who shall say that Man is less equal than albatross or sparrow to the task of subduing the elements of the atmospheric world?

With further evolution in these departments, and consequent improvement in the condition of the people, all intellectual and moral conditions may be hopefully expected to improve, and the people will grow in character as they acquire knowledge, gaining intelligence as they secure ease of life, and will rise to a higher plane of rectitude and happiness as they are relieved of the grinding pressure of the poverty of earlier times.

Progress has come to be enormously rapid, and the advance of a generation is much greater than was formerly that of centuries. We may reasonably hope to see something of this multiplied progress of the coming generation; our children will see the still larger multiplication of gain of the twentieth century, and help carry the world a long way toward that ideal which has been but feebly described in Plato's Republic and More's Utopia, and has been the aspiration of all good men.