Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/35

 rhetorical phrases in describing this age of ours: the age which some profess to find prosy and materialistic in comparison with the earlier age when a handful of plethoric land-owners ruled England, and little children worked in filthy rooms for twelve hours a day, and cut-throats, in most charming costumes, slew each other in the fields of London. I have not the least desire to use rhetoric; I do but express my feeling, and what I take to be the feeling of “advanced” people generally, as it comes to me. But in this poetry there is the solidity of scientific prose. Some time ago I sailed slowly toward Teneriffe from the south. Eighty miles away, on a fine morning, the summit of the Peak showed its delicate contour in the clouds, hardly distinguishable from them. We thought it an illusion, a simulating cloud, because far below the summit the blue sky seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The Peak floated in the air. But, as we drew nearer, the blue band below it grew thinner, and at last it disclosed the massive bulk of the supporting mountain.

Speaking as a sober student of history and science, I say that this dream of a brighter and happier earth rests on no less solid a foundation. We see primitive man, blindly, and with infinite slowness, move towards civilisation: we see civilisation slowly, with many a tragic interruption, advance toward the modern age: and now we see the pace quicken enormously, and we find a new consciousness of power and a deliberate aim at higher things bear the