of d (California
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A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
Crown 8vo, cloth, 68.
IN PERIL OF CHANGE
Essays written in Time of Tranquillity
BY
C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M.A., Author of " From the Abyss."
" Mr Masterman has a singular gift for correlating widely different phenomena, and is always quick to discern the inner significance of literary and other fashions. He attempts to describe the tendencies of English civilisation, to estimate the nature of its dominant ideals, and to point out recent changes which have occurred in these, the nature of the foundation upon which they rest, and the likelihood of catastrophes in the future. . . . The book is clever, interesting, useful. . . . We welcome its appearance." — A thenteum.
" All who care to make acquaintance with one of the new forces of which the twentieth century will see the victory or the defeat will do well to read ' In Peril of Change.' "—Westminster Gazette.
" The essays are of high literary quality, vigorous, yet unaggressive ; just in appreciation and sym- pathetic in treatment. One cannot overpraise such stimulating and thoughtful work as Mr Master- man's. ... It is a good thing for a man to think, but it is better still to make others think, and this is exactly what ' In Peril of Change' does." — Daily Telegraph,
" Let everyone who wants to read quickening and suggestive ideas on modern problems and principles buy the book, for whether the reader agrees or dis- agrees he is compelled to think." — Ftell Mall Gazette.
LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN
A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
ZTbe Expectations of an ©ptimist
By
T. BARON RUSSELL
Author of "A Guardian of the Poor," "The Mandate," etc.
*~AJrt
OF THE
UNIVERSi
Of
LONDON
T. Fisher Unwin
Paternoster Square
1905
., ,,r.
There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased ; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life ; which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
SHAKESPEARE, 2 Henry /f7., III. i.
They pass through whirl-pools, and deep woes do shun, Who the event weigh, 'ere the action's done.
WEBSTER, Duchess of Malfi, II. 4.
All Rights Reserved
PREFACE
THE following was at first intended to be no more than an attempt to foresee the probable trend of mechanical invention and scientific discovery during the present century. But as the work took shape it was seen to involve a certain amount of what may be called moral conjecture, since the material pro- gress of the new age could not very well be imagined without taking into account its mental characteristics. In these expectations of an optimist, a great ethical improvement of the civilised human race has been anticipated, and a rate of progress foreseen which perhaps no previous writers have looked for. Both in regard to moral development and material pro- gress, it has been the aim of the author to predict nothing that the tendencies of existing movement do not justify us in expecting.
An attempt of this kind is exposed to facile criticism. It will be easy for objectors to signalise this or that expected invention as beyonc} scientific possibility, that or the other moral reform as fit only for Utopia. But those who will consent to perpend the enormous and utterly unforeseen advance of the nineteenth century will recognise the danger of limiting their anticipations concerning the possibilities of the twenty-first. A fanciful description in (I think) Addison's Spectator of an invention by which the movements of an indicator on a lettered dial were imagined to be reproduced on a similar dial at a
167190
vi PREFACE
distance, and employed as a means of communication, must have seemed wholly chimerical to its readers ; and even as recently as fifty years ago, anyone who predicted the telephone would have been laughed at. When the principle of the accumulator was already discovered a very competent practical electrician told the writer that he need not worry himself much about the idea : there was not the least likelihood that electricity could ever be " bottled up in cisterns " ! On the whole there is more likelihood of error in timidity than in boldness when we attempt to foresee what will be attained after the increasingly rapid movement of scientific progress during this twentieth century shall have gathered full force.
For the rest, criticism of this sort is disarmed, because the reader has been in any case invited to enter a realm of more or less pure imagination. No one can exactly know with what births, monstrous or beautiful, the future may teem. Admitting a certain point of view — that of almost unrestrained optimism — the predictions here offered will, it is believed, be found to be along the line of existing progress.
BEAUFORT HOUSE, BRENTFORD.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PA6K
I. THE RATE OF PROGRESS i
II. HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION.
QUESTIONS . . . .13
III. THE MAN OF BUSINESS . 38
IV. THE CULT OF PLEASURE . -54
V. THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE AND THE
FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER . . 68
VI. UTILISING THE SEA . . . -95
VII. THE MARCH OF SCIENCE . . . 106
VIII. EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE . 134
IX. RELIGION: THE FINE ARTS, LITERATURE . 175
X. THE AGE OF ECONOMIES . . . 205
XI. THE LAW A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE . 233
XII. CONCLUSIONS .... 286
INDEX ..... 309
vij
A Hundred Years Hence
CHAPTER I
THE RATE OF PROGRESS
To anyone who has considered at all attentively the enormous material advances of the nine- teenth century, a much more remarkable thing than any invention or improvement which that century brought forth must be the speed of human progression during the hundred years between 1800 and 1900, and the extraordinary acceleration of that speed which began to establish itself about the year 1880. But in- deed, during the whole century, our forward movement was steadily gaining impetus. The difference between the state of the world in 1700 and its state in 1800 is insignificant com- pared with the differences established between the latter date and the opening of the twentieth century. But it is hardly less insignificant than the progress of the decade 1800-1810 compared with that of the decade 1890-1900. We are, in fact, picking up speed at an enormous rate.
2 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
The beginning of the twenty-first century will exhibit differences, when compared with our own day, which even the boldest imagination can hardly need to be restrained in conjecturing. The latter part of the nineteenth century was the age of electricity, just as the middle part was the age of steam. The first part of the twentieth century is evidently going to be the age of wave manipulation, of which wireless telegraphy, as we know it, is but the first in- fantile stirring.
What the developments promised (and they are already quite easily presageable) by wire- less telegraphy will give us, and what they will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined ; what their effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured even to hint at. Few things are more remark- able in the numerous and highly-varied experi- ments of vaticinatory fiction and more serious efforts of prognostication than the utter absence of any adequate attempt to forecast the future of the race itself. Social and political changes, the enormous differences which are certain to be effected in the manner of human life, have been from time to time more or less boldly imagined, and a couple of volumes of very able forecasts of the future have recently been published by a writer of singular vision and highly-trained scientific imagination. But it does not hitherto appear to have been at all
THE RATE OF PROGRESS 3
fully perceived that the moral constitution of man himself is quite certain to be profoundly modified, not alone by the influence of a I' material environment which will have been changed as the environment of man has never been changed since the first inhabitation of this planet, but also by the steady development of inward changes which have already begun to manifest themselves. Since the year 1800 ideas which, so far as we have any means of knowing, had been regarded as irrefragable ever since man first began to think and to set his thoughts upon record, have been utterly shattered. One has only to compare the opinions of even average thinkers of our own day on such subjects as marriage, the status of woman, and the education of children, with the opinions, practically current without material change since the dawn of history, in 1800, to perceive the truth of this statement ; and the change of attitude on the part of civilised people, outside the Roman Catholic Church (and, to some extent, even within it), towards religion is not less remarkable. An en- lightened man of the present day is so radically different in all his ideas from a similar in- dividual of the early nineteenth century, that it is hardly possible for a modern student to write with any intelligence on the deeper significance of events and life prior to 1800. Grotesquely inadequate as most historical novels of our own
4 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
day are, they are perhaps hardly less in- adequate than our own understanding of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott could probably write of crusaders and the age of chivalry without committing serious blunders of sentiment. What the world thought in the age of Saladin the world practically thought in the age of Napoleon. But the irresistible in- fection of modern ideas has made it hardly possible for us to enter with any fulness into the sentiments of Scott ; and the sentiments put into the mouth, and the thoughts into the mind, of the hero of any historical novel of our own day would be utterly incomprehensible to that hero, could he by some miracle be resusci- tated, and could we translate them literally to him. We unconsciously endow the personages of our historical fiction with ideas for which they had not even the names.
And the development of the human mind proceeds apace. It will be even more difficult for the ordinary cultured man of a hundred years hence to form any full conception of our ideas than it is for us to appraise the mental attitude of the men of the eighteenth century. To take a single example : the humanest warrior of the Napoleonic wars appears a monster of cruelty if compared with the sternest of modern generals. Napoleon devastated provinces without a word of censure from competent critics of the art of war. A howl of execration
THE RATE OF PROGRESS 5
went up, not from continental Europe alone, at the measures — seriously embarrassing to our military operations, and enormously helpful to our enemy — which the British generals took in order to diminish the sufferings of the non- combatant population of the Transvaal ; camps of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel in comfort the hospitals of our own wounded ! And there is a section of the Press in this country which still occasionally remembers, to complain of it, the fact that our generals found it necessary, for military reasons, to burn farm- houses. I should not like to attempt the con- jecture, what Wellington would have said in answer to such a complaint, or what he would have done to a self-appointed emissary who visited his camps for the purpose of criticising his action ! It would have been no more im- possible for him to foresee the day of such things, however, than it is for us to predict the moral sense of the year 2000. The fact is that f\ we have greatly deteriorated in war, although, or rather because, we have even more greatly improved in morals and feeling. William % Morris conceived of man in the coming time as
o
a sort of recreated mediaeval. Mr Wells con- ceives him as practically a nineteenth-century man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new material conditions. Bellamy described him in terms of a being inconceivable by any sort of reason. No one appears to have seen that his
6 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
moral nature will have been not merely revolu- tionised, but recreated, just as our own morality has been recreated during the last hundred years, not so much by the influence of material environment or the march of invention, as by the regeneration of human conscience.
In no way will the acceleration of the speed of progress be more apparent than in the thoughts and emotions of men. But to say this is not to belittle the progress which science and invention have in store for the new age. In applying a sort of imaginative telescope to the mental eye it will be necessary to keep con- stantly in view the utter inconceivableness of modern achievement by the civilised world of the past. When electricity was no more than a sort of scientific plaything — when notions of its possible uses were (as in Davy's time) far less substantially imagined than, for instance, the possible uses of radium are to-day, even scientific thinkers, endowed with what Huxley so luminously applauded as scientific imagina- tion, had no rudiment of the materials for con- ceiving such inventions as the electric telegraph — far less the possibilities of transmitted and picked-up wave energy. And here, at the beginning of wireless telegraphy, we are no less in the dark as to what will develop from it and what will supersede it. The nineteenth century progressed, almost from first to last, on the strength of the discovery of how to utilise
THE COAL AGE AND AFTER 7
the stored energy of coal, whether directly in the steam engine or indirectly in the dynamo- electric machine and the electric motor. With the end of the coal age already well in view, we can only conjecture what the sources of mechanical power will be a hundred years hence. Before we have quite exhausted our coal measures and begun to draw more liberally on our stores of petroleum, we shall no doubt have abandoned altogether so wasteful a con- trivance as the steam engine. There is a clumsiness almost barbarous in the roundabout employment of coal to produce heat, the steam engine to utilise only a miserable fraction of the potential energy even of the part of the coal which we do not fatuously allow to escape as smoke ; of the dynamo to use up a part of the motion yielded by the steam engine in pro- ducing electricity (while a small but recognis- able portion of that motion is converted wastefully back again into heat), and of the electro-motor to re-convert the electricity into motion, heat, light and chemical energy, according to our requirements. It cannot be many years before we learn to use coal far more economically than we do nowadays, abolishing the furnace and the steam engine, and obtain- ing electricity directly from coal itself by some sort of electro-chemical decomposition. But even so, our coal will not last much longer. The speed of our progress will exhaust it much
8 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
sooner than most people imagine, and probably in another twenty-five years the end of our petroleum will also begin to be looked forward to with apprehension.
About this period, or perhaps immediately after, progress will have been accelerated to an enormous degree by the invention of some new method of decomposing water. The economical analysis of water into its two component gases, whose chemical affinity and antipodal electrical attractions are already utilised to some extent in such appliances as the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and electrical storage batteries, is a secret capable of extra- ordinary beneficences to the new age. By burning hydrogen in oxygen we can already produce the greatest heat practically needed in the arts ; the electric furnace only superseding this process because it happens to be more manageable. But when we want oxygen and hydrogen, we do not, in practice, now obtain them from water : we only combine them as water in the act of utilisation. The rational line of progress is obviously to seek means of directly decomposing water. When we can do this compendiously and economically we shall have an inexhaustible supply of energy — for water thus used is not destroyed as water, as coal is destroyed, qua coal, when we utilise its stored energy. The very act of utilising the gases recombines them : and we
THE COAL AGE AND AFTER 9
can use them thus for the production of almost every kind of energy that man at present needs. We can use them for heat by burning them together. We can use them for light by burn- ing them in the presence of any substance capable of being made incandescent. We shall be able to use them to generate electricity by some sort of contrivance akin to the accumulator of the present day (a highly rudimentary invention) ; and it would be even now a very simple matter to utilise their explosive recombination for the direct produc- tion of power as motion. Utilised apart, the constituent gases of water have many other uses and possible uses. Hydrogen, under suitable treatment, yields the greatest obtain- able cold, as oxygen and hydrogen together yield the greatest heat. If our flying-machines need a sort of ballast to reinforce their mechanical lifting apparatus, hydrogen is the best possible assistant. And the probable uses of oxygen are yet more numerous. So long as we still burn anything at all except a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen — and ultimately we shall have nothing else left to burn — oxygen is capable of multiplying the efficiency of all combustion. One of the greatest problems of our own day is the dis- posal of waste products of all sorts — the sources of inconvenience, disease and dirt. Oxygen, if readily and copiously obtainable, is
10 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
capable of destroying them all. Indeed, it seems likely that medicine, the least progressive of the sciences to-day, will find in oxygen the great propulsive force of its forward move- ment. In considerably less than a hundred years hence such makeshifts as drugging, and the fighting of one disease by the instalment in the organism of another, will certainly have gone by the board. Antisepsis and Asepsis (the latter almost infinitely the greatest inven- tion in the history of therapeutics) will have pushed their way from surgery into medicine. There are numerous diseases which can be not merely cured, but ultimately abolished when we have once discovered how to use oxygen adequately. The readjustment of the conditions of life determined by the removal from the civilised world of the greater number of diseases, and perhaps of all diseases except those arising out of wilful misconduct (as im- proper diet) and even by the elimination of most of the evils of hurry and overwork (for what are medically and chemically known as fatigue products can almost certainly be eliminated from the system by the proper use, yet to be discovered, of oxygen) must in- evitably have an enormous influence not merely upon the physical life of man, but also, and even more, upon his mental constitution. The rate of progress will thus in yet another way be vastly accelerated.
ELECTRICITY AND AFTER 11
Most likely the universal source of power, then, before the middle of the century, will be the recomposition of water — in other words, we shall get all the power we want by splitting up water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then allowing those gases to recombine, thereby returning to us the energy we have employed in the analysis. How we shall employ this power is largely for the future to decide, and certainly in the earlier future we shall employ it in the generation of etheric waves of various kinds. The world of science is visibly on the threshold of new and revolutionary discoveries on the nature and composition of matter, and whither these discoveries will lead us it is not usefully possible to conjecture. But certainly, after the usual incubation period of a scientific discovery — when it is merely a sort of wonder- ful toy, as argon and radium are at present — there will come the practical men, suckled at the large and noble breasts of disinterested, unremunerative truth, and ready to turn that nutriment into world-moving material useful- ness : so, again, the rate of progress will receive a vast and valuable acceleration. Electricity, whose gift to the world has been so great, will probably not, until after several decades, approach the limits of its realm, and so long as electricity remains a considerable element in the utilisation of those stores of dissipating energy by which the planet lives, it is possible
12 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
to foresee something of what will become of man during the next age.
We have here the limits of such an inquiry as the present. Placing the end of the age of electricity at provisionally about a hundred years hence (but it is quite conceivable that the rate of progress may overtake it earlier and shut the door on conjecture) it is possible to forecast, not indeed with certainty, but with a measure of imaginative probability, what will happen as the resources of electricity are developed and the other material amenities of the world are worked along the line of natural progress. So far as the light of analogy can point the way the reader is invited on a sort of conjectural journey. Of the developments of the moral ideas of man likely to be deter- mined, not so much by the coming change in his material environment, as by the evolution of inner forces already at work, I propose to say something at the end of the book. In the meantime, the probable material changes in the next hundred years (or less, according to the rate of our progress) in various depart- ments of life will be the subject of some inter- mediate conjectures.
CHAPTER II
HOUSING, TRAVEL AND POPULATION QUESTIONS
WHEN every allowance has been made for the material changes which the progress of this century threatens, it is easy to see that certain^ present-day problems" will continue to trouble our successors. Some things which perplex ourselves will, I think, work out their own remedy. Others will remain the subject of solutions not difficult to be imagined in advance.
One chief difficulty which will infallibly con- front the immediate future, and even the future that is more remote, arises out of the simple fact that the race of man tends to increase numerically at a speed greater than our de- vices for its accommodation can quite con- veniently cope with. The population of the world not only increases, but increases at compound interest. Nor is this all. Improved sanitation, better habits of life, and the progress of medicine, prolong lives that in the conditions of last century would have been shortened, and the rate of increase is thus further accelerated,
14 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
as individuals who in different conditions would have died, live on, perhaps reproducing their species, and thus intensifying the population problem. Against these influences may be set the effect of the restrictions imposed by some civilised peoples on the birth rate, which Mr Roosevelt calls " race suicide." These practices, just now increasingly prevalent, retard the rate of increase, but do not at present stop our increase : they alleviate, but do not cure the difficulty of over-population. Artificial physiological checks on population, if I am right in certain other conjectures to be presently developed, will not form part of the permanent morality of the new age, partly because, with more enlightenment, they will be voluntarily abandoned or superseded, and partly because the necessity for them will have disappeared, having worked out its own cure.
But with all this it would be folly to antici- pate that the population of the civilised world will not have greatly increased before the end of the period contemplated by the present inquiry : and this brings us face to face with two very important questions — those of housing and transport. Where shall we live, and how shall we move from place to place — above all, how shall we proceed from home to the scene of work and thence home again every day, in the future ? Shall we indeed thus move back and forth at all ?
THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE 15
The answer to the last question bifurcates somewhat. In the earlier future of (say) twenty or thirty years hence, probably the greatest tendencies will be towards concentration on the one hand and exceedingly rapid transport on the other. What the ultimate practice will be, it should not be difficult to guess when we see how these tendencies are likely to work themselves out.
During the last twenty-five or thirty years of the nineteenth century the tendency of workers in great cities was more and more towards suburban life, men travelling to and from the cities in increasing numbers, to in- creasing distances, and at increasing speeds. Even mechanics, even labourers and the other humbler wage-earners (to say nothing of clerks not earning much more, but spending their money in a different manner) nowadays travel considerable distances to their work. But in spite of what is complacently regarded (by railway and tramway directors) as rapid con- veyance, there is lately manifest an increasing impatience against the time subtracted from men's leisure by the two daily journeys, an impatience very naturally increased in the case of manual workers of both sexes by the utter inadequacy of the legislative control imposed upon railway and tramway companies.
Crowded trams and trains, with desperate men and weak women fighting a daily battle for
16 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
conveyance before all the cheap trips have been made, inflict a shameful degradation upon the class for which Parliament makes illusory pro- vision in railway and tramway Acts. As a consequence of this difficulty, and also because of the early hour at which the companies are allowed to cease carrying working-folk at the workmen's fare, many men and women are compelled to waste some hours of their scanty leisure every day between the arrival of their trains and the opening of their workshops, a cruelty for which the blame may be pretty equally apportioned to Parliament and the com- pany directors. The result of it is that many of the poor prefer the evil of overcrowding in cities before the greater evil of wasted time and degrading travel. As time goes on, no doubt the monopolists of transportation will be com- pelled, as their own necessities increase and so bring them under the hand of the legislature, to serve more adequately the necessities of the majority. But even so, and as long as the effective speed of conveyance is limited by the lack of permanent- way space and the necessity for frequent stations, the impatience even now manifested, and manifested chiefly by the class which suffers least from loss of time in travel, will lead to concentration. Taking London as an example, it may be said that the Victorian age was the age of the suburbs. But few people now live in the suburbs of London who
THE HOUSE OF THE FUTURE 17
can afford to live anywhere else. Either they move right out into the country, seeking a spot on some main line where the greater distance and less-frequent train service is made up for by speedy and uninterrupted journeys ; or they come into London and occupy houses or flats within easy reach of their working head- quarters. The suburbs are given over to those who cannot afford either of these expedients, or who, having been brought up there, are retained by a sort of inertia. Ultimately, as the demand for town space becomes intensified, two things will happen. First of all, the restrictions which many cities, ignoring the freedom of New York and Chicago, impose upon the erection of excessively high buildings, will go by the board. The shutting out of sunlight and fresh air will be the subject of compensations to be presently explained, and thirty, forty, fifty or a hundred-storey houses, and houses which perhaps burrow to some distance underground, will, by virtue of the same compensations, house a vast, concentrated population impatient of daily travel. As the demand for homes increases, and even the high buildings cannot cope with it, the cities will push their way outwards, repopulating the rebuilt suburbs. This kind of thing will have a tendency to correct itself. Rents will be high in proportion to position near the centre. But a limit of toleration will be reached, and as
18 A HUNDRED YEAIIS HENCE
certain improvements will have been effected in transport, there will ultimately be a reaction, and people will again go right out to the country, as long as there is any country left. Before discussing these improvements, how- ever, it will be convenient to examine the con- veniences, social and sanitary, of the homes of the new age. The greatest convenience of all, no doubt, will be the modification and partial elimination of the domestic servant. There is every reason to believe that the great difficulties of the servant question as at present experienced will solve themselves, forming in part an instance of the moral changes, accompanying material invention but only partly resulting from it, which the new age is certain to experience. It is usual to lay the blame of the unsatisfactory character and atrocious inefficiency of the domestic servants of our own day on the institution of free education. They are much more due to the absence of any education worthy of the name, and to the imperfect civilisation of modern houses. Thirty-five years or so are but an instant in the life of an institution so overwhelmingly more important in its possi- bilities than any other subject of legislation as State-compelled education of the people. No one appears to have recognised that character - making, which Herbert Spencer called the most important object which can
I
THE SERVANT QUESTION 19
engage the attention of the legislator, is the only true object of education, free or other- wise. When politicians have talked of the necessity of national education, the argument they have used was that Germans are better chemists than we are. When they praised the usefulness of modern languages it was in terms of commercial utility. " Modern languages, in fact" (a recent critic remarked), "make a good bagman." It is inept to despair of free education because free education has produced no very satisfactory results while conceived of as a process of shoving undesired knowledge into the children of the poor. Looking, as everyone not hidebound by pessimism must look, for a great enlightenment of the law-giving class when the system of party politics, already beginning to show signs of decay, has ceased to hold all legislation in its blighting hand, we have every reason to expect that the true uses of education will be perceived and attained long before the end of the period contemplated when we speak of the new age. And then, one very great factor in the servant question will have been satisfactorily solved, even if other conditions have not conducted us nearly all the way to the solution beforehand.
For, while making every allowance for the evil effects of education, wrongly conceived and improperly administered, on the character of women destined to become servants, it must
20 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
be allowed that much of what we call the servant difficulty could be cured now, and will unquestionably be cured before long, by inventions capable of abolishing the grievances which lead to it. These grievances are real and remediable. I do not refer to the con- finement, restraint and gross lack of con- sideration on the part of employers which lead young women of the class from which servants are drawn to prefer labour in factories and elsewhere, in conditions far less comfort- able, before domestic service ; but to our utter lack of ingenuity in removing the irksomeness and degradation of much domestic labour. Some coming inventions calculated to improve the lot of Mary Jane will now be described.
In the first place (as Mr H. G. Wells has pointed out, without apparently being aware that buildings already exist in which some of his ideas have been anticipated), modern rooms, equally with those of all time, seem to have been constructed so as to make it as difficult as possible to keep them clean. Square corners and rectangular junctions of wall and floor, wall and ceiling, will certainly before long be replaced everywhere by curves. But the work of house cleaning will be rendered easy and unlaborious by another invention, already indeed in existence on a large scale, but eventually capable of being rendered portable. I mean a contrivance for
A CLEAN AGE 21
applying a vacuum to any desired spot. There is a very ingenious but rather noisy engine already in use for pumping the dust out of carpets, curtains and furniture. In the houses of the future handy contrivances of various shapes, all independent of any engine, will be found, furnished with elastic nozzles on the outside and with some sort of appliance capable of instantly exhausting the air within. Such a utensil wheeled over the floor will remove instantly every particle of dust from the surface and below the surface of the carpet, at the same time picking up any such ddbris as scraps of paper, pins, and other decidua of the previous day. A similar in- strument, differently shaped, will clean the curtains, supposing curtains to be still in use at the time, and will dust the chairs and tables — though there will not be anything like so much dust as there is now, nearly all kinds of combustion being abolished. The kitchen fire will of course be an electric furnace: "oj my word we'll not carry coals." Lighting will all be electric, and no doubt wireless. The abolition of horse traffic in cities, and the use of the vacuum apparatus which will be con- tinuously at work in all streets, keeping them dry and free from mud, will practically remove the necessity for boot brushing, even supposing that we shall still wear boots : every man and woman in dressing will pass a vacuum instru-
22 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
ment over his and her clothes and get rid of even the little dust existing — for we shall be more and more intolerant of dirt in any form, having by that time fully realised how dangerous dirt is. The new age will be a clean age. A lady of the year 2000 who could be miracu- lously transported back to London at the present moment would probably faint (they will not have ceased fainting) at the intolerable disgustingness of what is, I suppose, now one of the cleanest cities in the world, even if the cruelty of employing horses for traction, and the frightful recklessness of allowing them to soil the streets in which people walk, did not overpower her susceptibilities in another way.
Cooking will perhaps not be done at all on any large scale at home, in flat-homes at all events ; and in any case, for reasons which will hereafter become apparent, cooking will be a much less disgusting process than it is to-day. In no case will the domestic servant of a hundred years hence be called upon to stand over a roaring fire, laid by herself, and to be cleaned up by herself when done with, in order to cook the family dinner. Every measure of heat — controllable in gradations of ten degrees or so — will be furnished in electrically-fitted receptacles, with or without water jackets or steam jackets : and unquestionably all cooking will j|be done in hermetically-closed vessels.
A CLEAN AGE 23
We shall not much longer do most of our cook- ing by such a wasteful and unwholesome method as boiling, whereby the important soluble salts of nearly all food are callously thrown away. As, for reasons to be developed hereafter, it is quite certain that animal food will have been wholly abandoned before the end of this century, the debris of the kitchen will be much more manageable than at present, and the kitchen sink will cease to be, during a great part of the day, a place of unapproachable loathsomeness. On the other hand, its conveniences will have been greatly increased. It is difficult to under- stand how the old-world fashion of (for in- stance) <c washing up" plates and dishes can have endured so long. Of course, in the new age, these utensils will be simply dropped one by one into an automatic receptacle ; swilled clean by water delivered with force and charged with nascent oxygen ; dried by electric heat ; and polished by electric force ; being finally oxygen-bathed as a superfluous act of sanitary cleanliness before being sent to table again. And all that has come off the plates will drop through the scullery floor into the destructor beneath to be oxygenated and made away with.
Here we have most of the distasteful elements of domestic service got rid of. Naturally lifts of various kinds, driven by the same force (whatever it is) which lights and
24 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
warms the house, will be everywhere in evi- dence. The plan of attaining the upper part of a small house by climbing, on every occasion, a sort of wooden hill, covered with carpet of questionable cleanliness, will of course have been abandoned : it is doubtful whether stair- cases will be built at all after the next two or three decades. And it is likely that the more refined sentiment of the new age will recoil before the spectacle of menial service at the table. Not because they will despise, but be- cause they will respect, their domestic assistants, hostesses will dislike to have their guests waited upon in a servile manner during meals by plush-breeched flunkeys of the male, or neat-handed Phyllises of the female, sex. Well- arranged houses will have the kitchen on a level with the dining-room, and the dividing wall will be so contrived that a table, ready laid at each course, can be made to slide through it into the presence of the seated guests. An immense amount of running to and fro between kitchen and dining-room, and of lifting food and table-ware into and out of elevators, will thus be obviated, to the vast gastronomic improvement of the meal and the salvation of servants' time,
Naturally the bedrooms of the new age will have many amenities lacking to our own. It is not too much to anticipate that we shall have learned enough of plumbing to be able to
BEDROOMS A.D. 2000 25
connect baths, wash-basins and other necessary fittings with the drains without poisoning our- selves, and the inconvenient modern " wash- stand " with its unreticent adjuncts will decently disappear. It cannot be very long — probably it will only be a few years — before some kind of reasonable control is exercised over the technical education of plumbers.1
Thus the bedroom of the new age will be a much more convenient and satisfactory apartment than the one we slept in last night, and another irksome and unelevating part of the domestic work of our servants will be eliminated. But the sleeping-apartments, and indeed all apartments in city homes, will contain yet another very valuable and neces- sary article of furniture — the oxygenator. Nearly all the unhealthiness and the pinched, weary greyness of town-dwellers to-day could be cured by fresh air. Everyone is familiar with the improvement which can be effected in the health and appearance of a city family by even a short visit to the seaside or the country — an improvement which it happens to be fashionable just now to attribute, in the
1 Drains, it might be supposed, would disappear alto- gether from the scheme of things in favour of some kind of destructors. For reasons connected with a more en- lightened view than we have yet reached of certain aspects of terrestrial economy, however, I think they will, with modifications, still exist.
26 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
former case, to the presence of ozone in the sea air. The fact that holiday-makers are able to endure the smell of slowly-decaying seaweed with a dash of putrescent fish about it, which is called " sea-air," without injury, and even to pick up health in the presence of it, is more due to the absence of carbon dioxide and other deleterious gases of the towns than to anything else. The beneficent effects of country air are practically all due to the power possessed by green vegetation of superoxygenating the surrounding air. The atmosphere of cities, or at all events of city homes, will presently be freed from the products of combustion and respiration, and endowed with a slightly- increased proportion of oxygen, by artificial means. And especially in bedrooms, rendered to-day stuffy and unhealthy by the idiotic fear of night air which an effete tradition has handed down to us, will this reform be in evidence. Prudent people to-day insist on large bedroom windows — preferably of the French - door pattern — and keep them wide open all night. But this is attended by inconveniences in cold and wet weather ; and while our grandchildren will still keep their windows open all night in all weathers, they will not be content with this alone. There will be a chemical apparatus hidden away in some corner, or; built into the wall, which will absorb carbon dioxide and at the same time slowly give off a certain amount
FUTURE TRAVEL 27
of oxygen — just enough to raise the oxygena- tion of the air to the standard of the best country places. And similar appliances will be at work in the streets of our cities, so that town air will be just as wholesome, just as tonic and invigorating, as country air. If the theory that the presence of ozone (that is, allotropic oxygen) in the sea air is beneficent stand the test of time, no doubt ozonators will form part of these appliances : but in any case, as the high buildings of the new age will keep out the sunlight, electric light, carrying all the ray-activity of sunlight, and just as capable of fostering life and vegetation, will serve the streets. Thus, so far as hygiene goes, town life will be on a par with country life : but many people will prefer the country, and means will have to be provided to render homes in the country compatible with work in the cities. This brings us to the question of transport.
I do not think that people will, within the next hundred years at all events, travel to and from work in flying-machines. But no doubt the system of railway transport will be revolu- tionised. What makes suburban travel so slow is, not so much lack of speed on the part of the trains, as the necessity for frequent stoppage. You cannot satisfactorily run a train at sixty miles an hour and stop it every minute or so : otherwise sixty miles an hour
28 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
would be quite fast enough, for some decades at least, to satisfy all requirements of suburban traffic, though it would be, and indeed is, ridiculously inadequate for long - distance travelling. The expense of increased per- manent-way hampers railway management, and as there is no possibility of getting more land to increase the number of available tracks, some method will have to be devised for run- ning one train over the top of another — perhaps to the height of several storeys, not necessarily provided with supporting rails : for we may very conceivably have discovered means by which vehicles can be propelled above the ground in some kind of guide-ways, doing away with the great loss of power caused by wheel friction ; that is to say, the guides will direct, but not support, the carriages. The clumsy device of locomotive engines will have been dispensed with. Whatever power is em- ployed to drive the trains of the next century will certainly be conveyed to them from central power-houses.
But, as the reader has been already re- minded, it is the stoppages which are so wasteful of time on a suburban railway : and they are also wasteful of force. Now in all respects the new age will be economical. One thing that will have to be perfected is the art of getting up speed. Look, as you go home to-night, at the way your train gathers
FUTURE TRAVEL 29
speed on leaving a station. Observe what a long time it is before it can attain its full velocity. A large part of the total time you require in order to reach the suburbs is con- sumed in this manner. A hundred years hence trains will almost jump to full speed, somewhat as a motor-car jumps to-day. In collecting passengers at suburban stations, the train, a hundred years hence, will perhaps not stop at all. It will only slacken speed a little ; but the platform will begin to move as the train approaches, and will run along beside it, at the same speed as the train itself, so that passengers can get in and out as if the train were standing still. When all are aboard, the doors will be closed all together by the guard, and the platform will reverse its motion, and return to its original position ready for the next train.
With trains travelling at quite 200 miles an hour — and certainly nothing less will satisfy the remoter suburbanites of next century — frightful accidents would occur if precautions were not taken. The moment two trains are in the same section of line they will be automatically cut off from the source of power, and their brakes will at the same time bring them to a standstill. A passenger who put his head out of the window of a train travelling at this speed would be blinded and suffocated ; so the windows will be glazed, the oxygenators
30 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
and carbon-dioxide absorbers in each carriage keeping the air sweet, and other suitable appliances adjusting its temperature. There will be no such thing as level crossings ; wherever the road crosses the line there will be bridges, provided with an endless moving track (like the automatic staircase at the Crystal Palace), to carry passengers and vehicles across. Of course horses will long since have vanished from the land, except as instruments of the pleasure of a few cranks who affect the manners of that effete period, the year 1900.
And the omnipresence of high-speed vehicles will in itself have eliminated much danger of accident. It is not to be supposed that the unresting march of mechanical im- provement will have failed to have its effect on the people. Man himself will have progressed. He will be cleverer in avoiding accidents. Cities will be provided with moving street- ways, always in action at two or more speeds ; and we shall have learned to hop on and off the lowest speed from the stationary pavement, and from the lower speeds to the higher, without danger. When streets cross, one rolling roadway will rise in a curve over the other. There will be no vehicular traffic at all in cities of any size ; all the transportation will be done by the roads' own motion. In smaller towns, and for getting from one town
FUTURE TRAVEL 31
to another, automatic motor-cars will exist, coin-worked. A man who wishes to travel will step into a motor-car, drop into a slot- machine the coin which represents the hire of the car for the distance he wants to travel, and assume control. Here again the progress of man will come into play. Everyone will know how to drive a motor-car safely. If you doubt it, consider for a moment the position of a man of 1800 suddenly transported into a street of modern London. He would never be able to cross it ; the rush of omnibuses, motors and bicycles would confuse and frighten him. Imagine the same man trying to use the underground railways of to-day, or to get up to town from a busy suburb in the morning. He would either be killed out of hand or left behind altogether from sheer inability to enter the train.
We may safely suppose that the ocean ships of a hundred years hence will be driven by energy of some kind transmitted from the shores on either side. It is absolutely un- questionable that no marine engine in the least resembling what we know to-day can meet the requirements of the new age. The expense of driving a steamship increases in such a ratio to its size and speed that the economic limits of steam propulsion are fore- seen. Probably the ships of A.D. 2000 will differ entirely in appearance from those we
32 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
know. Just as road friction is the bugbear of the railway engineer, so water-resistance is the bugbear of the marine engineer. The ships of a hundred years hence will not lie in the water. They will tower above the surface, merely skimming it with their keels, and the only engines they will carry will be those which receive and utilise the energy transmitted to them from the power-houses ashore — perhaps worked by the force of the very tides of the conquered ocean itself.
The housing problem is so intimately and visibly connected in our minds with the growth of population that the more vital entanglement of the latter with the food question is hardly perceptible except to economic experts. The ordinary newspaper reader is not in a position to trace the intimate significance of prices ; indeed, he often regards it as rather a good thing that wheat should fetch a good price per quarter, forgetting that low prices for commodities mean increased purchasing power for money, and a better standard of life for the people. When such elementary implications as this are overlooked, it is hardly remarkable that the more obscure connection of population with prices is never thought of. Yet it is obvious that unless the sources of supply increase more rapidly than the consuming population, prices must rise — in other words, the purchasing power of money must diminish.
POPULATION QUESTIONS 33
Wages, to some extent, will no doubt rise also, but as competition seriously affects the markets for manufactured goods and machinery, and the increase of population not only tends to raise prices of commodities, but also restricts the rise of wages, relief will have to be found in economies of various sorts. The standard of comfort in working families must improve considerably; partly because the demand for improvement, taking the shape of industrial combination and trade-unionism developed to a high degree, will be more and more clamor- ous ; partly because of public feeling. What is currently called the growth of sentimentalism in modern life is really the development of modern conscience. No doubt the abolition of judicial torture was at one time regarded as a mark of absurd sentimentality ; and the opinion has already been expressed that a vast amelioration of public morality is in store for the new age. A great element in the conflict between comfort on the one hand and competition on the other will be economy of means. That is why the new age will, among other things, be an age of economy.
In the matter of food, chiefly, a great saving can be effected. Nothing is more painfully ludicrous — I use the incongruous collocution advisedly — than the spectacle every winter of money being- laboriously accumulated for the
34 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
provision of free meals for the poor, and spent, to a great extent, so wastefully as on meat soups and white bread. The crass ignorance of the poor, who will not touch wholemeal bread, and indeed regard the offer of it as something in the nature of an insult ; and who cannot be induced to believe that meat is one of the least satisfactory and most expensive forms of nourishment, is of course responsible in great part for this error. If we would get our nitrogen from pulses, nuts, and use vegetable fats derived from nuts, and bread made from entire wheat-kernels finely ground (instead of being only half ground as in most " brown breads")1 our "free dinner" chanties would be able to feed at least twice or three times as many people for every pound collected as they do at present. But the proposal would probably excite an outcry and we should hear that the poor were being treated as animals and that we fain would fill their bellies with the husks that the swine do eat. But all kinds of influences will tend to eliminate flesh from the dietary of the new age. " Growing sentimentalism," already in arms against the use of animals for highly necessary scientific investigations, will, as it develops, be revolted by the idea of killing for food ; and the refine- ment of the future will come to regard the
1 The chief difficulty in utilising the useful integument of wheat disappears when the whole grain is finely milled.
POPULATION QUESTIONS 35
eating of dead bodies as very little better than cannibalism. Moreover, the constantly in- creasing demand of the new age upon bodily and nervous energies will call for nourishment suited to their supply. This, and the waste- fulness of second-hand food, will banish all flesh from the bill of fare. Fish will be eaten longer than meat. But more than anything else, the need for economy will reform our dinner-tables, and eventually all food will have to be obtained directly from the soil, if we are to have food enough to nourish our overgrown population at all. We shall not be able to afford to waste the ground on pasturage. We must use it to produce cereals, nuts and fruits, which are not only a much more remunerative crop, but will also use up in their assimilation far less nervous and peptic energy — energy which we shall need to make the most of. The cereal foods — products of wheat, barley, maize, and perhaps still (to a certain extent) oats — which will form the staple of our diet, will be partially cooked at the granaries by dry heat ; they will need very little treatment at home. Vegetables, cooked, not in the wasteful manner now in vogue, but by con- servative methods which will preserve their valuable saline constituents, will have to be prepared in our own kitchens ; but pulse in various forms (as pease, lentil flour, etc.) will be supplied to us almost wholly cooked. A
36 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
cheap, nourishing and delicious dietary will thus be made available.
Finally, the reader will not be unprepared for the opinion that alcohol, as a beverage, must inevitably disappear. Not only because the price of intoxicants is an unproductive expenditure (and we shall have to be more and more thrifty as time goes on) but because the nerves of the new age would never stand them, must all alcoholic beverages be regarded as destined to obsolescence: and the legislative aspect of this question must presently be touched upon. Already a considerable part of the people, in no way influenced by the illogical idea that the abuse of a commodity by one class calls for the abstention from it of another, refrains from alcohol simply because its use inflicts too great a strain on the system. A good many people even now find it neces- sary to abstain from tea or from coffee for precisely similar reasons ; while the highly- organised nervous systems of others find in the latter a stimulant capable of all the advantages of alcohol (and they are many) and not without some of its penalties. I think it quite likely that when alcohol is gone, the nerves of the future may find it necessary to place the sale of tea and of coffee under restrictions similar to those at present inflicted upon the trade in alcohol : and it is quite certain that morphia, cocaine, chloral, perhaps
POPULATION QUESTIONS 37
ether, and similar products, will have to be very jealously safeguarded within the next few years.
Differing from many writers, I do not regard this development of the nervous system as a mark of degeneration. On the contrary, it is a part of the great and rapid adaptation which is bound to take place in the constitution of man himself ' to the rapidly-changing con- ditions of his environment, his life, and the duties he will have to fulfil. To overlook the certainty of such adaptations is to be blind to all history, and especially to all recent history. The men and women of the new age will differ from ourselves in much the same sort of way as we differ from our great-grandfathers. They will differ more only because the progress of the century which we have lately begun will be so much more rapid and various than those of the century before — itself the period of enormously the greatest changes since the world began to be civilised.
1 It is necessary to say here, as an offset to possible misconstruction, that the word " evolution " has been purposely abstained from. The processes of evolution are far slower than the changes here contemplated. The latter are voluntary and purposeful, involving no construc- tional alteration in the physical frame of man, but only functional modifications, intentionally inaugurated and pursued.
CHAPTER III
THE MAN OF BUSINESS
WHATEVER changes may take place in the organisation of society during the present century, we may regard it as certain that the folk who
" Rise up to buy and sell again "
will be always with us. The man of business will possess many conveniences denied to the city man of to-day. It is, for instance, to be supposed that the inordinate defects of even the best telephone systems will be eliminated. When wireless communication of ideas has been perfected, of course the telephone ex- change Ayill disappear. Differential " tuning" — the process by which any wireless telephone will be able to be brought, as transmitter, into correspondence with any other wireless tele- phone, as receiver — will enable every merchant to "call up" every other merchant. Instead of, as at present, looking up his associate's number in the directory, and getting connected by the clumsy junction of wires at an exchange office, the merchant will look up the tuning-
38
RECORDING TELEPHONES 39
formula, adjust his own telephone to it, and ring a bell, or otherwise employ means for attracting the attention of the man he wants to speak to. As a great proportion of all the business transacted will be done by telephones the frequent occurrence of disputes as to what has or has not been said in a given conversa- tion will have rendered safeguards necessary. Consequently, every telephone will be attached to an instrument, developed from the phono- graph, which will record whatever is said at both ends of the line. Precautions will have to be devised against eavesdropping. After communication is established, probably both parties to a conversation will retune their in- struments to a fresh pitch, which, in cases requiring special secrecy, could be privately agreed upon beforehand.
The form which the records above suggested will ultimately assume must be a matter of conjecture. It is quite possible that the written word may in all departments of life lose some of its present vital importance. We may imagine, if we choose, that instead of creating records which can be read, we may find it advisable to create records that can be listened to : and some of the apparent in- conveniences of this substitution may easily be supposed to be dispensed with. The handiness of a written memorandum is largely a matter of habit. A practised eye can " skim "
40 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
a long document, and either through the use of black-type headlines, or by pure skill, alight upon exactly the passage required ; and if it were necessary, in order to find a given passage, to listen to the whole document being read over by the recording phonograph, no doubt much time would be lost. We shall not be so extremely intolerant of loss of time, perhaps, in the new age, as some people imagine : but in any case, if the speed of the phonograph be ima- gined as adjustable, it will be perceived that we could then make it gabble parrotwise over the inessential, and let it linger with more delibera- tion over what we wanted to assure ourselves of. We could even "skip" useless portions — one can do this with phonographs already in use. Probably such aural records may be made capable of acceptance in courts of law, and the maxim verbum auditum manet will take the place of a well-known proverb of our day. Very likely business letters may some day take the form of conveniently-shaped tablets, made of some plastic material, and capable of being utilised by means of a talking machine.
Or if these changes seem too chimerical, we may essay the more difficult task of conceiving a means by which the spoken word may be directly translatable into print or typewriting. The waste of time and energy entailed by the present plan of dictating what we want to say to a stenographer or into a phonograph, for
RECORDING TELEPHONES 41
subsequent transcription, renders some sort of improvement urgently needful ; nor are these wastes the only grievance, as the introduction of a second personality into the operation of recording speech introduces a simultaneous possibility of error, and an outrageous waste of time is caused by the necessity of reading over what one has dictated laboriously to a stenographer or into a phonograph, to make sure that it is correctly transcribed. It is obviously a much more difficult matter to translate speech directly into printed words than to translate it into something which may again produce the sounds of speech. The first step would be the invention of something which would print a phonetic representation of speech — as, for instance, shorthand of the kind invented by Sir Isaac Pitman. Even this requires us to imagine machinery of a kind whose very rudiments do not at present exist. Indeed, we can only conceive such an instru- ment by the use of the supposition that some entirely new manipulation of sound-waves will be discovered ; and if we conceive that, there is no particular reason why we should hesitate before the notion of speech directly translated into print such as we use in everyday life. If we are going to limit the possibilities of the future by the actual achievements of the present, we shall certainly fall short of any adequate notion of what a hundred years'
42 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
accelerated progress may be capable of: and I do not see wherein the direct reproduction suggested is any more inconceivable than, for example, telephony, or even photography, must have been to a man of a hundred years ago. The greatest danger attending our attempt to preconceive the amenities of the next century is that we may limit our expectations too narrowly.
On this ground, perhaps, I may be thought too cautious in assuming that the present form of alphabetical writing and printing will survive at all. But there are two things which seem likely to give it permanence. The first, of course, is literature. If we adopt an entirely new form of writing and printing for general use, we must either set to work to translate all our literature into it, thereby probably losing some formal beauties which the culture of the world will not consent to sacrifice ; or we must make up our minds to use (as the Japanese do at present) two kinds of writing concurrently ; and the difficulty of overcoming the vast inertia of the human mind (which alone still suffices to exclude from English commerce so obviously convenient an innova- tion as decimal coinage) will probably negative this. This inertia is the second consideration likely to give permanence to our present form of English alphabetical writing.
However this may be, the convenience of
THE ALPHABET, A.D. 2000 43
direct wireless telephony will certainly, when supplemented by records of whatever kind, greatly facilitate commerce. The tedious process of writing a letter, posting it, and awaiting the reply, at present persisted in chiefly because it is so necessary to have some sort of documentary evidence of what has passed, will be largely dispensed with when we can secure an automatic record of what we say. Nearly everything will be done by word of mouth.
The great inconvenience, apart from the absence of record, which attaches to transac- tions or negotiations by telephone at the present day, is that a telephonic conversation is not nearly so satisfactory as a personal interview face to face. Gesture, attitude, the language of face and eyes, all do so much to elucidate communication in the latter way, that we lose a great deal when we meet an associate at the other end of a telephone wire. Well, the telephone of the new age will remove this drawback, or rather it will be supplemented by something which will do so. This invention, not at all difficult to imagine, I will call provisionally the teleautoscope. It will no doubt have some name equally barbarous. The teleautoscope can be ex- plained in a single sentence. It will be an instrument for seeing by electricity. What- ever is before the transmitting teleautoscope
UNIVERSi
44 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
will be visible before the receiving teleauto- scope wirelessly en rapport with the former. Thus by telephone, by phonograph, and by teleautoscope, a wireless conversation will combine all the advantages of a personal interview and a written correspondence.
No doubt the post - office system of this country, despite occasional lapses, is as nearly perfect as any human institution, in the present state of society, can be reasonably expected to be. But it is equally certain that in so far as postal communication is required at all in the new age it will have to be vastly improved both as to speed and precision, compared with what we now, sometimes rather thanklessly, enjoy. For instance, that impatient age will certainly not tolerate the inconvenience of having to send out to post its letters and parcels, or the tardi- ness of having these articles sorted and passed on for delivery only at intervals of half an hour or so. We may take it for granted that every well-equipped business office will be in direct communication, by means of large-calibred pneumatic tubes, with the nearest post-office. And however rapidly and however frequently the trains or airships of the period may travel, the process of making up van loads of mail matter for despatch to remote centres, and re- distribution there, is far too clumsy for what commerce will demand a hundred years hence. No doubt the soil of every civilised
FREIGHT AND TRANSPORT 45
country will be permeated by vast networks of pneumatic tubes : and all letters and parcels will be thus distributed at a speed hardly credible to-day.
Already every bank of any importance prob- ably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements of which these machines are capable. Account books, invoices, and all similar documents will doubtless be written by a convenient and compendious form of com- bined calculating machine and typewriter, which we may suppose to be called the numeroscriptor. It will, of course, be capable of writing anywhere — on a book or on a loose sheet, on a flat surface or on an irregular one. It will make any kind of calculation required. Even such operations as the weighing and measurement of goods will all be done by automatic machinery,1 capable of recording without any possibility of error the quantity and values of goods submitted to its opera- tion.
Naturally transport will be the subject of something like a renascence. So far as inland
1 There is a contrivance already in existence which not only weighs what is placed upon it, but can also be made to calculate the value of the goods at any desired rate per ounce, pound or hundredweight.
46 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
communication goes, the chief difficulties to be overcome already call loudly for amendment. We cannot for more than a decade or so make do with the present railway tracks, and either (as already hinted) by means of some invention to enable trains to run one above another, or by some entirely new carrying device such as I will now try to suggest, the new age will certainly supersede or supplement the transport of to-day.
The device most likely to be adopted, in the near future at all events, is something in the nature of elevated trottoirs roulants for goods. If we can conceive all the cities of a country to be linked-up by a system of great overways, we have at all events a feasible solution of the difficulty. There could be a double row of tall, massive pillars, between which could run a wide track, always in motion at considerable speed. It need not be a lightning speed. Most of the tardiness of railway transportation does not, in this country at all events, arise from slowness of trains, but from congestion at goods stations, and this in turn is due, partly to insufficiency of rolling stock, but much more to insufficiency of permanent way. The latter evil is very difficult to cope with. But the system of moving ways, providing a rolling stock equal in length to the line itself, will be a great saving. Returning upon itself the endless track will continuously transport mer-
NO MORE GOODS TRAINS 47
chandise in both directions. Elevators, suitably placed, will give access to it wherever needed. Probably the motive power will be electrical : and we may confidently anticipate entirely new sources of electricity. It is obviously clumsy to create power in the first instance, convert power into electricity (I use popular language), and then convert electricity back again into power. Much more hopeful than any idea of developing that method would be the conception of new ways of creating and applying motive-power directly. But, almost certainly, electricity, obtained in some new way, will do the work of the world for many genera- tions yet — until, in fact, we devise or discover something more convenient.
It will have been perceived that nearly every improvement and innovation above sketched out involves, and will be indeed designed to effect, great saving of labour. With such economies, and an increased population, there is evidently going to be a difficulty about employment.
Moreover, the great facilities enjoyed by commerce will tend to make commerce ex- tremely powerful. Already great organisers of business begin to evade competition by combining in vast "trusts," whose tendency is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. There is a further cause for the aggrandise- ment of the large trader and manufacturer at
48 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
the expense of the petty retail dealer. More and more every year the unprogressive methods of small shopkeepers foster the success of large multiple retailers. But it is likely that retail businesses, whether great or small, will ultimately tend to be eliminated. Manu- facturers and trust companies will supply the public directly. What, then, will be the solu- tion of the great social difficulties about to be created ?
The answer is, that these difficulties, and especially the developments above confidently predicted for a future comparatively near, are probably transient in their nature. It is not yet the time to discuss political questions r but the problem here directly raised demands a few words of reassurance from the professed optimist.
There can be no doubt of the great social and political dangers involved in so enormous an aggrandisement of the commercial and manufacturing class as we shall most of us live to witness. What is called the problem of the unemployed grows every year more difficult and less obviously hopeful. Moreover, the concen- tration of great wealth in a few hands is in itself a political danger, even apart from the fact that it implies widespread impoverishment. There are dangers of corrupt legislation, for instance, and other dangers too.
But there will be another great force at work
LIMITATION OF WEALTH 49
in which may be foreseen the solution of many difficulties beside this. When public education becomes rationalised ; when it is employed chiefly as a means of character-making ; when the universal education of mankind has the effect of turning out men and women capable of thinking, and not merely of remembering, the teeming population of the working class will begin to exercise an intelligent influence on the legislature — which at present it certainly cannot be said to do. And one thing which the intelligently-elected Parliaments of the new age will assuredly discover is this principle : that it is not good for the State that any one man, or any one associated body of men, should possess an inordinate amount of wealth.1
Once this principle is discovered and acted upon ; once it is illegal for any person or cor- poration to be seised of more than a certain fixed capital ; the dangers of inconvenient
1 A practical objection to this principle may be here anti- cipated and answered. Politicians may say that for any one nation to be the pioneer in the adoption of such a policy would have the effect of driving trade and manufactures into other countries where the restriction did not exist. But there are so many highly necessary reforms open to a similar objection that I think there is no doubt that ultimately the jurists of all nations will agree upon some arrangement for universal legislation, whereby laws not affecting the relations of one country with another will be simultaneously enacted by a comity of nations. We have already one very imper- fect example of such a procedure in the Convention against bounty-helped sugar.
50 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
aggrandisement will vanish. Nor is this principle in any way unprogressive or injurious to the commonwealth. It is, in fact, not even injurious to the individuals affected. No reasonably-enlightened being can pretend that a sensible hardship would be inflicted on millionaires by being forbidden to pile Pelion upon Ossa in their present insane manner. A very rich man, compelled to desist from the accumulation of wealth, and consequently driven to the task of finding out how to enjoy it intelli- gently, would be almost infinitely better off for this constraint. The effect of the ordinance for the limitation of wealth will be to remove all temptation to concentrate manufactures in a few hands. It will open the doors shut by trust companies on competition. It will multiply factories of moderate and convenient size : and one other effect of it will be to improve many manufacturing processes in themselves. There are a great many things which can be cheaply turned out in uniform batches, every article exactly the counterpart of every other, hideous in economical uni- formity, because they all emanate from one or two great factories, which, if the manufacture of them were distributed over a number of small factories, would, from this circumstance alone, and from the stress of wholesome competition, be greatly improved. Probably many industries, desirable in themselves, but driven out of
REVIVED HANDICRAFTS 51
successful being by our present system of con- centrated manufacturing, would revive. Crafts of what we call regretfully the good old kinds would spring up, rejuvenated : cheap uniformity would cease to be the principal ideal of manu- facture. The people would be able to afford agreeable furniture, utensils, decorations, and household goods of all kinds, where they now have to put up with horrible but cheap make- shifts. For one great advantage of the ordinance just predicted must not be lost sight of. When you restrain the rich from becoming inordinately richer, you concurrently save the poor from being made proportionately poorer. This ideal, it should be remarked, is in no sense socialistic. It is, on the contrary, the natural development of individualism.
Hardly less certain is it that before the beginning of the twenty-first century all manu- factures and all commerce will be co-operative, the workers in every industry being paid, not by fixed wages, but by a share in the produce of their labour. Instead of the profit of all trade and manufacture being secured to the managers and owners of lands, machinery, transport and other commercial utilities ; while labour, the equally necessary and indeed the preponderant element of production, is reckoned as a mere element of cost, in the form of wages ; the profit will be shared all round. The more prosperous the enterprise, the more money the
52 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
workers will receive. No man will be able to grow rich by sweating his workmen. Neither will the present degrading temptation for every workman to perform his task as perfunctorily and as lazily as he can, so long as he does not get dismissed from work altogether, survive this reform. On the contrary, it will be directly worth every man's while to do his work as well as he possibly can. The dignity of labour — a phrase now justly mocked — will become an elevating and delightful practicality. A great many articles of everyday use will be better made than it is possible to get them made to-day. The spectacle of the producers of wealth herding in squalid cabins, clothed in the rags of cast-off clothing, eating garbage, en- joying nothing but intoxication, will give way to a more wholesome and natural state of affairs. Nor will the owners of machinery, of factories and the like long oppose this de- velopment. What are called labour-troubles will cease to exist when the interest of employer and employed is identical. The problem of the unemployed will solve itself. Leisure, and an opportunity to employ leisure wisely, will have been bestowed upon the poor as well as we have seen that it will be bestowed upon the rich. A man will have no need to spend practically all the unfatigued hours of every day at the bench, the loom, or the lathe. He will want recreation. While one batch of men is
THE WORKING MAN 53
seeking this there will be an opportunity for other batches to work. And work itself, once it is work for an intelligent objective, once it is work that there is a comprehensible reason for trying to execute as well as it can possibly be executed, will lose much of its irksomeness — to the vast improvement alike of the product and the producer.
CHAPTER IV
THE CULT OF PLEASURE
CERTAIN predictions in the foregoing chapter will have suggested to all who accept them that the cultivation of pleasure must occupy a large part of the energy of the new age. From the moment when men, sufficiently astute and purposeful to accumulate enormous fortunes if they were permitted to do so, are required by law to desist from useless and injurious money- getting, a vast amount of ingenuity will be diverted to the development of the useless. The skill expended upon money-making — and let it be admitted frankly that, however un- scrupulous one may be, it is not easy to become a millionaire — will be turned to the task, almost equally difficult, of spending it satisfactorily. We may consider it as practically certain that the pleasures of the new age will be largely intellectual in their nature. The stupidity of merely sensual pleasures will revolt the intelli- gence of the future. Athletic sports of some kind, facilitated by certain inventions which can easily be foreseen, will no doubt be a
54
THE CULT OF PLEASURE 55
source of much enjoyment, though the grow- ing gentleness of mankind will abolish, as barbarous, games which take the form of modi- fied assault, as football, boxing, wrestling, fencing and the like. We shall certainly acquire a great distaste for fighting in any form when growing humanitarianism shall have put an end to war — a development which may confidently be predicted for the present century. Similarly — " Am I God, to kill and to make alive?" — we shall cease to take life for our amusement ; as, for sentimental and other reasons, it has been shown that we shall cease to kill for food.
What then will be our games ? One of the most likely instruments of sport will no doubt be the small flying-machine. It is not in the least probable, so far as can at present be foreseen, that purely aerial and self-directed vehicles for purposes of travel or transportation will be a feature of the new civilisation. The dangers and inconvenience of large aerostats are less accidents of imperfect invention than inherent difficulties of the subject. It is very probable that some means of propelling self- supported vehicles between guideways may be discovered. But, as it is not at all likely that any means of suspending the effect of air-resist- ance can ever be devised, a flying-machine must always be slow and cumbersome. Travel and transportation, to be attractive in the new
56 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
age, must be rapid in the extreme. Ships no doubt will skim the surface of the sea instead of resting upon it. But air-ships are not very likely to be anything but a sort of vast toy, within, at all events, the next hundred years.
But, as a means of amusement, the idea of aerial travel has great promise. Small one- man flying-machines, or the aerial counterpart of tandem bicycles, will no doubt be common enough. We shall fly for pleasure ; and just as thousands of working men and women now take a Saturday-afternoon spin on a bicycle, so they will go for a sky-trip, and visit interesting mountain-tops for (non-alcoholic) picnics. The bicycle or the motor-cycle will perhaps be the point of development. It is quite certain that within the next ten or fifteen years some means will have been discovered by which we can ride on a single wheel. The saving of weight thus effected will go a long way towards surmount- ing the flight problem. Then, when motor- unicycles are presently propelled by force transmitted (in the same way as Marconi's telegrams) from a fixed power-house, the difficulty of flight will be within sight of an easy solution. Any competent mechanician of the present day could design a flying-machine if the mere weight of the motive appliance could be overcome. When the motor is fixed on terra firma, and the vehicle only needs to carry
OUR GAMES IN A.D. 2000 57
a device for utilising the aetheric waves which the source of power wirelessly transmits, flight will be at least as simple a matter as wireless telegraphy is to-day.
When it is possible to cross the Atlantic in a day by means of surface-riding ships, propelled, like the flying-machines, by aetheric force, the field of amusement will be vastly increased, and although (as I shall show) it will no longer be necessary to travel in order to " see the sights " of any part of the world, the pleasure of being present at the actual events of life in different countries will probably never pall. So long as any parts of the world remain comparatively unfamiliar, young men and maidens will love travel. When it is possible, wrapped in warm woollens and provided with portable heating- appliances, to pay a short visit to the Arctic circle and enjoy the matchless spectacle of the Aurora Borealis amid the awe-compelling ob- scurities of the Polar night : when, with even less inconvenience, we can take a trip to the tropics and witness, here the unchangeable processes of Nature's luxuriance, there the perhaps immutable conservatism of the East, the new leisure of the coming time will have great stores of recreation for those happy enough to live in the dawning twenty-first century.
The more distinctively intellectual pleasures of the new age will be much subserved by one
58 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
class of invention, of which the rudiments already exist. By means of the phonograph we are able, not very perfectly, to reproduce as often as we desire sounds created in favourable circumstances. By various kinds of kineto- scope we can reproduce a rudimentary sort of picture of an event which has taken place in a good light. But when the phonograph has been developed, when moving pictures have been perfected, what a vast implement of amusement may be foreseen ! Each of these inventions is comparatively new. If we im- agine the discovery of means, developed from the phonograph, by which any sounds which have once existed in the presence of a record- ing machine can be reproduced at will, not in a makeshift sort of way, but without any loss of timbre and quality, with perfect articulation where articulation is necessary, with exactly correct time-regulation automatically determined by the first enunciation, and all this cheaply and compendiously, what vast resources of cultured enjoyment are offered to the lover of music ! How many people, denied the pleasure of learn- ing to understand good music by the difficulties and exertion attendant upon our infrequent and expensive concerts, will become true lovers and appreciators of it ! For music is only to be really enjoyed by the average man when it is repeatedly heard, repeatedly considered. Certainly the people of the
THE THEATRE, A.D. 2000 59
new age will be epicures of the emotions which comprehended music is so nobly capable of stirring.
No doubt the new age will have solved, in a far more satisfactory way than we have been able to solve as yet, the problem of chro- matic photography. When colour influences photographic plates or some contrivance substi- tuted for them, not indirectly by a mechanical sorting-out of tints, but by affecting directly the optical properties of the plates or whatever may succeed plates, we shall have marvellously accurate pictures.1
Nor is this all. The kinetoscope, as at present exhibited under various unpleasing names, is imperfect in two ways : first because it is powerless to reproduce colour, and secondly because it gives at best a mere magic-lantern picture violently out of focus, and by its pulsa- tory motion horribly distressing to the eyes. Chromatic photography will overcome the former difficulty. When we find out how to increase greatly the receptive rapidity of photo- graphic emulsion without spoiling what photo- graphers call the " grain " of it ; or when we have improved, as we every year are improving,
1 Not of course in the artistic sense of the word; nor is the supersession of art by optical process in the least con- templated here. The psychological interest of art will have appreciators more and more numerous in virtue of the diffu- sion of culture confidently anticipated.
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the optical qualities of lenses, we shall be able to have our pictures in focus. The distressing flicker of moving pictures is an objection purely mechanical in its cause. But when, as they will be in a few years, all these objections except the first have been removed, and even when we have colour-photography in a true sense of the word, there will still remain one field to conquer. We must have, instead of moving pictures, something which represents all objects as solid. The difference is the difference between an ordinary photograph and a highly-improved stereoscopic picture magni- fied to life-size. When these advantages are attained it will be possible to represent, exactly as it happened, any event which has been suit- ably photographed.
The utility of this as a means of intelligent amusement will be at once perceived. Imagine the theatre of the future. Probably it will not be beyond the means of the rich, even when restrained from over-possession as it is evident that they must be, to have theatre-rooms in their own houses. But the masses will no doubt go to the theatre much as they do now. Only instead of seeing a company of actors and actresses, more or less mediocre, engaged in the degrading task of repeating time after time the same words, the same gestures, the same actions, they will see the performance of a com- plete "star" company, as once enacted at its
THE EMANCIPATED ACTOR 61
very best, reproduced as often as it may be wanted, the perfected kinetoscope exhibiting the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated) rendering perfectly the voices of the actors and the music of the orchestra. There will be no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable of. The actor's art will be immensely elevated, not only by his relief from the drudgery of repeated performance and by the leisure thus afforded him for study and reflection, but also by the removal of what is keenly felt by all players of sensibility and ambition as one of the greatest drawbacks of the stage. We are accustomed to the actor's complaint that whereas the author, the sculptor, the painter, the composer of music, makes for himself a fame imperishable as the products of his art, the actor frets his hour and disappears from the stage, to be promptly for- gotten by an ungrateful public. Well, the actor's art, like the art of the executant musician, will have the endowment of perma- nency. And there will be a magnificent opportunity for the actor as artist, in that he will be able to compare himself and his fellows with the actors who are dead and can act no
62 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
more. It is probably true that Irving is the greatest actor since Garrick, but who can prove it ? The actor's art is transient to-day : it will be permanent, it will be classical, in the next century. By this fact not only will the pleasures of the theatre be made cheap, convenient and varied, but the art of the theatre will be vastly improved.
Just as the actor will be spared the drudgery of mechanical, parrotlike repetition, so the in- different maidens of the new age will have no need to waste their time in learning to play upon musical instruments more or less im- perfectly. No doubt some who are not pro- fessional musicians will do so for their own pleasure. But the professional executant him- self will cease, like the actor, to rank as a sort of superior harlequin or performing animal, exhibiting his powers for the diversion of an assembled public. What he has once played can, if he choose, be constantly repeated. The executant will be paid by a royalty on each reproduction, when he is wise. Less prudent artists will sell their records for a lump sum, just as the unthrifty author sells his copyrights. But let it be noted that, on the assumption that the reproduction is perfect, the evolution above predicted is a highly artistic one. In- stead of the executant or singer being judged by his performance on an occasion when fatigue, illness or unfavourable circumstances
NEW DELIGHTS OF A.D. 2000 63
may militate against his perfect success, when the nerve-shattering conditions of the platform probably in any case offend his susceptibilities and detract from the perfection of his perform- ance, he will be able to found his reputation upon the very best performance he is capable of. He will be able to try and try again in the privacy of his study. When he has satisfied himself, and then alone, will he publish his artistic effort to the world. He can destroy as many unsatisfactory records as he pleases, just as the sculptor can break up his clay when he has not succeeded, just as the painter can paint out his picture when it has not pleased him, and be judged only by his best.
It would be ignoring the most obvious char- acteristics of mankind to suppose that the pleasures of the new age will be limited to a mere mechanical development of those which we enjoy at present. There can be no doubt that new delights will be invented. With a general improvement in intelligence and in the standard of comfort ; with a moneyed class compelled, by the enactments which we have imagined, to enjoy a considerable accession of leisure ; with conditions which will, as we have hoped, reduce materially the necessary hours of labour for the worker ; with some of the most engrossing amusements of the present age abolished for sentimental reasons ; we may take it for granted that a great demand for
64 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
new recreations will develop. Some of these considerations might easily give us pause. We might perhaps fear that vice — either the exten- sion of existing vices or (if that indeed be possible) the invention of new ones — might be a terrifying problem of the next century, if we had not foreseen, concurrently with the other developments anticipated, a marked moral improvement in human nature. There is in the calculations of the pessimist and the re- actionary no fallacy more mischievous than the oft-recited aphorism that human nature is the same in all places and at all times. That is precisely what human nature is not. Spectacles which delighted ancient Rome would revolt modern civilisation. Spectacles which are still keenly enjoyed in Spain would revolt England or the United States, and probably awaken the activity of the police. Human morality has demonstrably advanced in historic time : it has very perceptibly advanced, as I showed in an earlier chapter,1 during the nineteenth century. But the improvement in this respect which the next hundred years will show must, in all human probability, greatly excel that of the past time. And thus, though a sane and reasonable anticipation will not exclude the possibility of regrettable accidents in the future moral history of mankind, it will also regard them as probably transient. The vices re- 1 Ante, Chapter I.
THE PSYCHICAL SIDE 65
garded as incident to complicated civilisations have perhaps been too hastily considered by despairing moralists. Vice is essentially stupid. It is only in occasional, in sporadic instances that we are presented with the terrible spectacle of great intelligences depraved by gross im- morality and animalism : and even then, this combination is only possible where a high degree of culture is in contact with a wide- spread unintelligence. Most likely it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been, that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly- civilised ages are in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic splendour and popular misery.
In one direction we may see means by which intelligent recreation may be supposed capable of vast developments. Already the study of the psychical side of man has been the means of extraordinary discoveries. Our knowledge of hypnotism, suggestion, thought- transference and similar psychological wonders, obscured though it has unhappily been by charlatanism and the importation into the subject of irrelevant follies, has great promise
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for the future man, whose psychical faculties will unquestionably develop at the expense of his animal instincts. It is hardly possible to limit our conception of the means by which thought will be communicated in the next century, but we may see just where the change will probably come. A printed essay, such as this, is obviously a successive translation of thought into words (in the brain), then of the words into letters, and then of letters into type, which is picked up by the eye, retranslated into words by one part of the brain, and finally transmuted into thought again in another part. If some method can be discovered of abolishing one or more of these processes, thought can be conveyed from brain to brain at an enormously increased pace, and with a delicacy of which we have no present conception. This develop- ment is not so inconceivable as it at first appears. We know as yet almost nothing of the processes by which (for instance) vibration, accepted by the ear as sound, is, in the brain- cells behind the ear, converted into thought. Speech and writing are purely conventional devices. If, instead of using these conven- tions, we can learn to transmit ideas immedi- ately from brain to brain, the next step may be an extraordinary development of intellectual pleasures, in the case of those individuals whose tastes are capable of thus being ministered to. But to say this is not to imply
THE PSYCHICAL SIDE 67
that the ordinary means of human intercom- munication will be dispensed with. For most occasions, and for all but the subtlest and most refined necessities of thought, no doubt books, newspapers and letters will remain a feature of everyday life — though of course with such modifications as the progress of the century will have called forth. The future of the newspaper in particular is a subject of such great importance that it requires to be dis- cussed in detail.
CHAPTER V
THE NEWSPAPER OF THE FUTURE, AND THE FUTURE OF THE NEWSPAPER
SUSPENDING, as hardly within the bounds of manageable conjecture, any attempt to follow up the suggestion with which the previous chapter concluded, we can very easily imagine the lines on which newspapers such as we know are likely to develop mechanically. A number of processes already existing in embryo can be shown to be capable of very great extension ; and several discoveries which an intelligent anti- cipation is capable of predicting could, and doubtless will, be applied to journalism.
To foresee the future of the newspaper on what may be called the editorial side is a much more difficult task, because we have here to take into account the influence of the developed and rationalised education of the people, which is certain to demand very great changes. Daily newspapers of the present moment are in a more or less transitional state. It can hardly, I think, be denied that the papers which enjoy the greatest popularity exhibit retrogression in
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NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 69
many respects when compared with the best newspapers of twenty-five years ago. But they are much more widely and popularly read. The collective influence of their largely-extended circulations is no doubt very great, though the influence of the newspaper on the individual is less, and is attained in a different way. The old .; newspapers aimed, and the survivors of their class still aim, at an influence based on argument. They used to report events, speeches and movements of their age more or less colourlessly, and to comment upon these things more or less one-sidedly, according to their respective political bias. They were pon- derous, cultured, dignified, and a trifle dull. When an adverse statesman made a speech which they did not like, they reported it faith- fully, and tore it to pieces in the formidable middle pages. The leading article was their most important weapon : they sought their chief effect by its means. But the day of the leading article is nearly ended. The newspaper of the early — perhaps the immediate — future will almost certainly dispense with leading articles altogether, and be much more a news- carrier than an educator. It will attack adverse opinion by simply not reporting it. 1 1 will some- times, no doubt, minimise facts unfavourable to its political side by garbling them. But leading articles had a useful function not yet men- tioned— that of explaining the news-columns.
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Things which the ordinary (but fairly intelli- gent) newspaper-reader was likely to have forgotten, or to be ignorant of, were (and still are, where leading articles worthy of the name exist) explained and amplified. In the news- paper of the future, little paragraphs having the same purpose will no doubt be, as they already begin to be, tacked on to the ends of news- items : and so far as comment continues to be given at all, on such matters as political speeches from the enemy, it will be given in this form. Speeches from the newspaper's own side will not require comment. Newspaper space will have too many demands upon it to permit of a statesman's arguments being first printed semi - verbatim (actual verbatim reporting hardly exists even now) and then marshalled forth all over again in editorials. Whatever attempt is made to influence opinion through political reporting will be made by selective processes. The arguments of the adversary will be simply suppressed.
Although the old newspaper was really a much more intelligent affair than the popular dailies of the present decade — and it is chiefly of daily papers that I am now speaking — it is not very likely that a reversion will take place. It is a curious feature of all progress, that how- ever much an existing institution may be per- ceived to be retrograde in comparison with older institutions, reversion hardly ever occurs.
NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 71
We adapt and modify what we have. We do not revive what we have lost. And the re- generation of the newspaper will be forced upon the newspaper- office by the development of public intelligence. Comment will probably during the next few decades be eliminated from daily journalism altogether, and confined to serious weekly publications, somewhat on the lines of our monthly reviews, and to other publications summarising the latter, like the present Review of Reviews^ perhaps the most useful periodical now being issued, with the single exception of The Times. Thus the daily newspaper will be entirely a vehicle for the pro- pagation of news, correctly so called : and very likely it will become almost entirely colourless, politically, because a well-informed public will resent obvious garbling or clearly unfair selec- tion. The newspaper reader will no longer (as now) want only to hear what is said on a side more or less emotionally and hardly at all reflectively embraced. He will want to know what is said on all sides, and will make up his own mind, instead of swallowing whole the printed opinions, real or momentarily as- sumed, of other people. Thus, though the frantic popular paper of to-day will no doubt increase and multiply, and replenish its circula- tion books, as long as the present system of blind half-education survives, the newspaper which satisfies the new age will be a very dif-
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ferent affair. It will no doubt discard many of the trivialities now reported as news, when a black woman of Timbuctoo could hardly bring forth four piccaninnies at a birth without the fact getting into the halfpenny London papers ; but it will record the really important news in ways far more graphic, and with a far more complete appeal to the imagination, than we have as yet any but the vaguest notion of.
The news considered most important a hundred years hence will probably be news as to developments of public opinion. It is hardly conceivable that exactly the methods of Government which exist at present will satisfy the developed consciousness of the new time : and most likely the methods then adopted for the ascertainment of public opinion, and the machinery devised for giving it administrative effect, will create subject-matter for a type of journalism of which the very perceptible rudiments, though still nothing but the rudiments, already exist. If I am right in expecting great results to flow from new ideas and practice in our educational system, it is certain that the notion of political freedom will greatly extend its effect : and the unavoidable corollary is that movements of public thought will become a matter of the very keenest journalistic interest and of the very highest journalistic importance. The most probable means to be adopted for giving effect, in the
NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 73
middle-distance of the future, to developed public feeling must be left for discussion in a later chapter : but when we perceive that the political duty of executing the will of the people must constitute the paramount work of the constitution-builder in the latter half of the present century, we cannot fail to deduce a vast effect on newspapers.
Broadly speaking, what will occur will be the result of clearer thinking. We shall very likely amend our political institutions after the characteristic English manner, which is perhaps really the safest, though it rather suggest the methods of a cobbler who repairs a boot by, from time to time, successively replac- ing sole, vamp, golosh and upper, until there remains a boot which is not a new boot, though it contains none of the original boot's material. Our constitutionhasbeenbuilt(to employ a better similitude) by a series of architects who recon- struct and repair the old building, with a constant adhesion to as much of the old style as they can retain, and who will in the end present the people with a house entirely re- constructed, but bearing marks all over it of the original design. We already begin to perceive that what is regarded as political freedom at the present day has developed from the entire tyranny of absolute monarchy, through the modified tyranny of limited monarchies, still not wholly powerless, to the nearly
74 A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
absolute tyranny of parliaments. The last now begin to delegate powers to local councils having administrative functions, and must pres- ently delegate them to local parliaments having legislative functions on some <( home- rule-all- round " principle, not because decentralisation is liked, but because the intolerable incon- veniences of centralisation will make decen- tralisation inevitable. The more energetic propagandists of various systems of con- stitutional reform nearly all agree in one respect : they all desire to set up some new kind of tyranny. Few — except the philo- sophical anarchists, who suffer from the oppro- brium brought upon the name of anarchists by quite a different set of thinkers — perceive that to endow with power any sort of machinery resting on the shifting will of a majority tends very little towards freedom and not at all towards stability — the latter even more im- portant in some respects than the former. In proportion to the development of education (in nature even more than in extent), it is likely that the present blind faith of the public in the ability of the State to do almost any- thing, and the still blinder tendency of the public to require the State to do all sorts of things which could be better accomplished otherwise, will diminish, and we shall perceive the enormous educational disadvantage of allowing the citizen to lean too heavily on the
NEWSPAPERS, A.D. 2000 75
State. A public properly and sufficiently educated will, with enormous difficulty (because there is nothing so hard to get rid of as a bad habit of dependency), gradually undertake the task of doing for itself by free combination what at present we try to get done for us by governmental machinery. One sees how this sort of thing is gradually evolving, in spite of the violent efforts of politicians to shove the world backwards and keep us walking on crutches instead of strengthening us to walk alone. Statutes determining the wages of labourers and the price of commodities are laughed at as examples of mediaeval foolish- ness, though (what is exactly the same thing in principle) Government still interferes with the freights charged by railway companies, and indeed is obliged thus to interfere because it has already gone out of the right way by the powers it has granted to railway companies. The new education — the education which builds character instead of merely diffusing information (generally useless) — will teach us the far greater advantages attaching to results attained by free combination, and the State will be relieved of many functions at present regarded as essential to it, and often sought to be increased.
Now the working of free combination for the attainment of these results would be almost impossible without the constant inter-
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change of views which newspapers subserve, and without careful newsgathering as to the progress in detail of various schemes and of public opinion concerning them.
To say that this kind of thing will constitute the most important class of news is not to imply that the public will develop an un- intelligent indifference to news of other kind, though it is allowable to hope that it will develop an intelligent indifference to the trivialities at present solemnly chronicled by the popular papers. It may be doubted whether, even now, the public is quite so passionately interested in the minutice of murder trials as editors imagine : but with invention steadily moving on, and its con- sequences habitually developing in unexpected ways, there will be plenty of "news" to chronicle.
Of course the one class of news which is at once the most expensive and the most help- ful to a daily paper — I mean its individual " exclusive " war correspondence — will be done with by the end of this century. Re- membering the rate of progress foreseen in the early part of this work J and the moral nature of that progress, we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the in- creasing amenity of the human race did not 1 Ante, Chapter I.
NO WAR NEWS 77
abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of de- struction : the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war. We have lately, in our own South African experience, seen how crushingly expensive, how intolerably impoverishing, a tiny war can be : and all this is a mere trifle compared with what it had cost us to be even very ill-prepared for even such an insignificant combat. This kind of thing cannot go on for very long and the peace of Dives ' must soon be upon us.
But even while war still continues to recur it is likely that the newspapers will have to sacrifice many of the advantages which they at present derive from the intense popular appetite for the details of organised death. The war-correspondent, when he can use the telegraph, is a great nuisance to commanders in the field, and the increasing difficulties and importance of modern combat will have the effect, eventually, of causing generals to forbid telegraphic communication from the field or its neighbourhood altogether, on account of the information, useful to an alert enemy, liable to
1 Kipling : The. Five Nations,
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find its way through the wires. Consequently x war correspondence will be all under strict censorship, and will take the form chiefly of written and photographic descriptions, in a documentary form, probably conveyed by the organisation controlled by the fighting army itself. These may perhaps be telegraphed to the newspaper office from some intermediate port when the theatre of war is distant — for unquestionably we shall, before very long, be able to telegraph pictures quite as easily as words. And this brings us face to face with one of the most interesting and important developments to be looked for in the vending of news. Beyond doubt, newspaper illustration will, in even the near future, be the subject of great and, in fact, of revolutionary improve- ment. Every daily paper will be copiously illustrated, and illustrated in colour. It is easy to foresee that before many years we shall be
1 It can hardly be disputed that the British generals in the late war in South Africa would have done well to cut the cables altogether, or at all events reserve them exclusively for their own use. There is very good evidence that, in spite of the interdiction of "coded" messages, information passed both ways between the enemy and his agents in Europe. The resolute manner in which the Japanese kept newspaper correspondents away from the scene of action until no action remained for them to correspond about, shows conclusively what will become of the war-reporter during the few remaining decades which separate us from the final disappearance of moribund war itself from the planet*
THE NEWS IN PICTURES 79
able to photograph any object or scene in its natural colours at one operation. We can already do so in three, and by the same number of machinings we can reproduce such pictures in print, provided we can afford to print slowly enough and on a sufficiently smooth paper. The process is in its earliest infancy as yet. We shall ultimately make it far more practicable. But even so, printing presses of the present sort are far too slow for newspaper use. A hundred years hence magazines and weekly periodicals may perhaps still be printed on greatly improved presses ; but daily papers will be produced by photography alone. Already the Rontgen rays will print a dozen or more images at a time on superimposed sensitive papers. In the next century all that will be necessary in order to multiply type- matter and illustrations in any number of colours will be to place the original on a pile of paper and expose it to the rays of some source of energy, when the whole matter will be impressed upon every sheet, and this not by any mere contact of type and process-blocks with paper (which involves serious difficulties, owing to the interference of the paper-surface with the grain of the etched " screen ") but by direct action of light, or of some influence taking the place of light, so that perfectly clear pictures will be produced. And news of all sorts will be the subject of this kind of illustration.
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What will happen will in detail be this. The teleautoscope x (the instrument by which sight will be wirelessly telegraphed) will ex- hibit the actual facts in every newspaper office from colour-photographs taken on the spot. What it shows will be rephotographed and re- produced in colours.
The amount of verbal description needed will thus be much diminished. Where an event can be long anticipated — when it is an event like the Delhi Durbar or the christening of the Czarewitch, for instance — elaborate prepara- tions will be made, and very perfect results published. And difficulties of merely photo- graphic detail, which at present restrict rapid photography to events in full sunlight, having been overcome, and instantaneous photography by artificial light having been made possible, such an event as an important theatrical pro- duction in London will be pictorially reported in the New York and San Francisco papers next morning. Where an event is of an unex- pected character — such as a great fire, a riot, or some sudden cataclysm of Nature — the teleautoscope will still be employed with great advantage. Take, for instance, the case of some large public building or some theatre destroyed by fire — though fires will not be so frequent in the new age as they are to-day. The local newspaper artists will select from 1 Ante, Chapter III.
THE NEWS IN PICTURES 81
their portfolios photographs of the building kept on hand for such occasions and get to work on them with paint-box and colours, de- picting the progress of what they will perhaps still cling sufficiently to tradition to call the "conflagration"; and they will transmit these efforts when it is not possible to transmit actual photographs of the event. And of course, when all is over, the ruins will be photographed in colours from every desirable standpoint, and the descriptive photographer will, in a great measure, supplant the penny-a- liner. Many pieces of news will doubtless be photographed from the small one-man air- carriages, the employment of which, as a means of recreation, we have already for- seen.1
The real " news " of the world will therefore be served up with far more vividness than even the most feverish present-day journalism dreams of, and the newspaper will be far more quickly "read," because long descriptive articles will have gone out of fashion, and a series of pictures, occupying much more space, but apprehended by the mind with far greater rapidity, will supply their place. Even in what remains of the printed word I think that great compression is probable. It must be remembered that even in the best-educated parts of England we are hardly through the
1 Ante, Chapter IV. F
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first generation which universally knows how to read, and already newspaper-English is taking on a character of its own, very different from the " journalese" of the old-fashioned reporters. By degrees a sort of slang, dis- tinguished chiefly by brevity and conciseness, will evolve itself in the newspapers, especially those published in large towns — though indeed it is quite evident that in a few years daily newspapers will be published nowhere else. This terse, quick language will, after a period of reprobation, be adopted even by the less progressive newspapers, at first shocked to tears of indignant printer's ink by the defile- ment of the mother tongue, and it will ac- celerate vastly the task of " running through the paper," a task which must, even in the less hurried manners which I foresee for the future, be made as speedy as possible by the newspaper that would thrive and increase its circulation. Thus literature, already restive in an uncongenial wedlock, will finally obtain divorce from daily journalism. This does not mean that literature will perish. On the contrary, it will develop. And the periodicals other than newspapers will excel our own in merit of every sort. They will be permanent, dignified and, above all, literary. For with the education of the people really carried to perfection, and with universal leisure, the result of improved social arrangements even more
ADVERTISEMENTS, A.D. 2000 83
than of improved mechanical processes, we shall have a demand for a really intelligent periodical literature, for really artistic illustra- tions, which will make it commercially possible to publish matter that only artificial endow- ment could support nowadays.
And shall we be content with it ? Certainly not ; for the new age will still be an age of progress, and the very perfection of the periodical Press will be the greatest of all stimulants to further effort.
Although, in some of their characteristics, they will be greatly ameliorated, advertise- ments may very likely still constitute one ground of discontent with the newspaper of the future. They sometimes are, in the news- paper of to-day, the subject of complaint not altogether reasonable, because if there were no advertisements there could be no newspapers. At all events, without this powerful source of revenue our newspapers could be neither so cheap nor so liberally conducted as they are ; and all the economies of the new age will probably be insufficient to enable newspaper proprietors to dispense with them. The better and the more generously-conducted newspapers are, the more money they spend in the careful collection, editing, printing and illustrating of public information, the more dependent they will become on the revenue from advertising, which is the sinew of journalism ; and the more
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widely and attentively newspapers are read, the greater will be the revenue they are able to command from this source* Moreover, they would be incomplete without this feature. The unreflecting newspaper-reader, who anathe- matises his favourite journal because its weight and bulk are increased by the presence of advertisements which he does not want, seldom takes into account the fact that there are plenty of his fellow-readers who do want them, or some of them, and that he himself is often in the same predicament. Thousands of copies of newspapers are bought every day in order to consult advertisements which they are known to contain. A man who purposes to take his family to a concert often buys The Daily Telegraph because he knows that The Daily Telegraph has more concert announce- ments in it than any other paper, and that it is in fact a practically complete directory to all the current musical opportunities of the Metropolis. Another man, who wants a secretary, or a steward for his estate, probably orders The Times because he knows that the best class of secretaries and stewards advertise in The Times for employment. One hardly goes to the theatre or buys a supply of coals without looking at the daily paper for information ; and assuredly this information is not inserted without being paid for ; in other words, it forms part of the advertisements. Deprived of
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newspaper advertisements as a way of announc- ing its need of clerks, warehousemen, labourers and assistants of all kinds, commerce, even if it could manage without advertisements of the sort more commonly thought of when the nuisance of them is being condemned, could hardly keep up its organisation at all. Thus, so far from this feature of our newspapers being a grievance, it is both directly and in- directly a boon to all who read them. And when we remember in addition that the cost of the paper and printing alone in a copy of most newspapers exceeds the price at which each copy is sold by the proprietor, so that the whole cost of newsgathering, the whole cost of editing, the fees of contributors and artists, and the cost of pictures and engraving, as well as the profit which induces persons to embark upon an enterprise so troublesome and pre- carious as newspaper-publishing, must be ob- tained from the cost of advertisements and from this alone, we cannot doubt that the enormously developed newspaper of a hundred years hence will "give us bold advertisement," even as now, and that our descendants will have the intelligence to be very glad that it does so.
This being unquestionable, we can hardly think that we have made a complete forecast of the newspaper of the future unless we consider what sort of advertisements it will contain, and
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in order to do this we must consider just what advertising is likely to be needed in the new age.
As every condition of commerce must necessarily be affected by the mechanical and economic developments of another century, evidently advertising will have to undergo vast changes in order to adapt itself to new require- ments. Already competition and the urgent demand of the public for all possible utilities and luxuries to be supplied with the greatest economy of money and trouble have produced changes in the machinery of supply and de- mand which must develop at an increasing speed as time goes on. One tendency of these things is current talk ; we speak of " eliminating the middleman." Well, the middleman will certainly be eliminated by the end of the century, and one of the forces which will help to eliminate him is the very force with which, at present, he endeavours, with a high degree of transient success, to defend himself — the very force we have to discuss here ; advertisement.
So long as a population is scattered into groups in small towns, and hampered by diffi- culty and expense in transportation, there is an evident advantage in the retail-shop system. But we can hardly with convenience remain a nation of shopkeepers in the present and future state of concentration and with cheapened trans- port. It is only necessary to observe the differ- ent ways in which we supply ourselves with
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commodities, according to where we live, in order to understand the tendencies at work. In a village remote from any large town there are generally one or two general shops, at which a highly miscellaneous collection of merchandise is handled. The smaller the village the more miscellaneous the stock kept at a single trading establishment. In a small town the shops differentiate themselves more : but they still cross the boundary lines of trade, and one gets tobacco at the chemist's and goes to the draper's for writing materials and books. When we come to towns somewhat larger, trades keep more to themselves, and it is often possible to find a place where there are no miscellaneous shops at all, except those owned by the in- dustrial co-operative societies now so common and so useful to the thriftier artisans. It is only when we enter the largest towns and cities of all that we find large shops divided into de- partments and again selling almost everything under one roof.
The conditions in these large towns are an index to what is likely to occur a hundred years hence : because (as has already been seen) towns will certainly grow, and the popula- tion will become more concentrated, while, even where improved facilities for travel enable men to live at a great distance from their work, the same facilities will enable their wives to do their shopping in the centres of commerce.
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Consequently, except for a few highly perish- able commodities, such as milk, butter and the like, small shopkeepers in residential neigh- bourhoods will be driven out of business, as they are in fact already being driven out of it in the suburbs and dependencies of all large cities.
It is always possible for a large miscellaneous trader to sell at a smaller percentage of profit than a trader in a single class of merchandise : and by his bulkier purchases the former is also able to start with a lower cost price, and thus he is in every way better situated to meet the demand for cheapness. He can also meet the demand for convenience, because when he is getting almost the whole trade of a family, even at some little distance, he can afford to arrange for the transportation of goods in ways con- venient to the purchaser. Thus the small shopkeeper will lose custom in every way and the large shopkeeper will gain custom. But there is still a middleman. We have not yet begun to see how he is to be eliminated, but only how he is to be limited in his numbers while being individually pampered with increased trade.
No one who observes the trend of things, however, can have failed to note how, from both sides, the middleman, qua middleman, is liable to be squeezed out. These very large retailers tend more and more to become, little by little, manufacturers instead of merely agents
V H
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for the manufactures of other people, Very often they are actually forced to this by the difficulty of obtaining a regular supply of goods of satisfactory quality from the existing factories. One of the largest companies doing a miscel- laneous retailing business has an enormous estate in the neighbourhood of London covered with orchards where fruit is grown for sale and for jam-making ; and it has factories of various kinds dotted all round the Metropolis, though a few years ago it was a simple trading concern which manufactured nothing. On the other hand, large manufacturers in many trades (of which the boot trade is an example which must have come under the notice of every reader) are tending to open retail shops of their own in favourable localities, so as to obtain the retailer's commission as well as the manufac- turer's profit. Evidently these large manufac- facturer-shopkeepers are more likely to be extensive advertisers than small one-shop retailers.
Another circumstance which will tend to the increase of advertising is already apparent in the growing tendency of the public to prefer branded or packed commodities before bulk goods. Such groceries as tea, oatmeal and the like are more and more purchased in packets bearing a manufacturer's name or trade-mark, instead of being purchased from bulk and wrapped up by the grocer. The obvious reason
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is that by this means a housewife can secure a greater uniformity of quality. She finds that she likes a certain manufacturer's oatmeal better than any other, and always buys it ; whereas if she bought bulk-oatmeal she would have the product now of one mill, now of another, and these products would vary. The only way in which a manufacturer can call attention to his speciality is to advertise it. The immediate consequence of this move- ment is the degradation of the retailer, who ceases to be the custodian (so to speak) of his customers' interest and becomes a mere hander-out of packed specialities. It is not very likely that every manufacturer of such specialities will become a retailer with shops everywhere ; but it is practically certain that trusts will be formed on a sort of co-operative principle by combinations of manufacturers, who will divide among themselves the expense of organisation and obtain the whole profit without having to share it with any middleman. And in many departments of commerce the elimination of the retailer will be secured by the utilisation of improved transport, orders being received at the works by letter or telephone and executed direct from manufacturer to consumer. Such business can only be stimulated through adver- tisement, and the newspaper of the future con- stitutes the most convenient medium for such advertisement.
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The intrinsic nature of the vastly-extended advertising of the new age will be influenced by the new growth of public intelligence. Once almost wholly, and now to a very great extent, addressed to the least intelligent faculties of the public — the faculties most liable to be influenced by large type and ad captandum phrasing — ad- vertising will in the future world become gradu- ally more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition ; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers. Skilful writers will be employed upon the work, and skilful journalists will think it no derogation from their dignity to be employed in the writing of commercial advertisements. No doubt the methods of illustration employed in journalism proper will also be pressed into the service of the advertiser, and in this, as in other respects, our " divine discontent " will still look for im- provements, and the newspaper of the future
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will be a vast improvement upon the newspaper of to-day.
Although the distinction between journalism and literature is likely to define itself more and more sharply — periodicals growing more literary, and newspapers less literary — it is here convenient to pause for a moment on the question of the direction in which literature is likely to develop — meaning especially imagin- ative literature and poetry. The past of this development, widely considered, has been, of course, since the close of the eighteenth century, from the classical, through the romantic, to the realistic school ; and the last has been associated with a greatly-increased and minute considera- tion of language as an implement of exact and elegant expression. Literature has become, and will no doubt continue to be, increasingly self-conscious. Happy effects are deliberately sought for. Felicity of phrase is no longer a matter of unconscious, almost accidental, accom- plishment ; it is purposefully and deliberately obtained. We no longer expect inspiration from the Muses, but climb Parnassus with arduous consciousness of our meritorious pedestrianism. The methodical, scientific orderliness of modern thought has, in short, invaded even the field of art, and we have sometimes an air of trying to make of literature an exact process. Perhaps very great literature, and certainly, according to all precedent, very
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great poetry, cannot be produced in that way. There is something of mystery about them, something of the instinctive, of the elemental, or, to speak with a more critical exactness, of the spiritual. And the development and circumstances of very elaborate civilisation do not wholly favour the spiritual. But to conclude from this that great poetry will never again be written would be to overlook one of the dis- turbing, the cataclysmal factors of human life. This factor is one of the greatest pitfalls of the would-be prophet. By examining the past, one could predict almost unfailingly the future, if there were not always, and in every department of life, the strange, incalculable thing which, for want of a better name, we call genius, to be reckoned with, to be almost alarmed by. We may examine, we may reason, we may reckon up almost anything ; but athwart all our con- jectures, charm we never so wisely, comes genius, and revolutionises everything ! 1 1 is the one thing which no formula can embrace. Not in the realms of literature and art alone will it break in and stultify our best prevision. In every department of life we must tread cautiously, aware that no one who would fore- cast the future can afford to neglect its disturb- ing possibilities. We must prayerfully and joyously expect that from time to time genius will suddenly arrive and pass across the stage, changing everything, bringing to naught our
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cunningest anticipations ; and as it is peculiarly the quality of literature to be thus perturbed and regenerated, we must not even attempt to predict what schools the literature of the future will pass through. The only thing we can be certain of is that from time to time some epoch- making mind will express itself. Acquainted with all the devices of the schools it will brush them all aside, and half unconsciously, half a- dream, as if indeed it were literally "inspired," it will establish new standards, engender new methods, and endow the time with new delights. Criticism will dissect, examine and explain, until the creative mind is almost persuaded that it has all along understood itself; but the one thing by which criticism must ever be eluded, the one thing which must ever elude prophecy, is genius itself. When all is said that man can say, and all is said in vain, the best explanation of the unexplainable is perhaps the old one, that genius brings in some way a message from outside the world. Perhaps, since there is always a demand for something which man can worship, this inspiration may be the subject of the conscious adoration of the new age. Perhaps we have here the subject of the religion of the future ; for inspiration, as we may most conveniently name this mystery, has just that character of the unknowable half- seized, which is precisely what the soul of man is ever yearning for.
CHAPTER VI
UTILISING THE SEA
EXCEPT for a small tribute in the shape of fish food and certain salts the ocean is to-day almost a dead loss to the world, and what is worse, the greatest of all obstacles to progress. It separates us from our kin, wrecks our ships, claims a yearly toll of dead, and is barren, fruitless, a mere receptacle for garbage. A hundred years hence we shall have awakened to these facts and found means to make "the caverns vast of ocean old" something better than a subject for the poet and a resting-place for the dead whom it murders.
Not every dream, however, can be realised — not even the engineer's. Some years ago certain ardent spirits in France announced that the desert of Sahara lay below the level of the sea and could be flooded with the Atlantic or Mediterranean. The effect of this, it was con- sidered, would not merely be to inconvenience certain Arabs, but to change entirely the climate of the rest of equatorial Africa. Laved by the beneficent waves of ocean, lands at present
95
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uninhabitable would, it was declared, become fertile and salubrious. The project was dis- missed or shelved as impracticable from engineering difficulties. Shall we, a hundred years hence, have met these difficulties ?
Probably not. To work such changes in the distribution of land and water will be a thing not indeed beyond the power of the next century's engineers, but beyond their daring. The accomplishment of them might, if at all rapid, be attended by frightful disasters, some of which can be readily estimated, but of which the worst would probably remain unforeseen and unimagined until the irrevocable moment of fulfilment. To increase to this extent the area of the world's oceans, without increasing (as of course we could not increase) their mass, would perceptibly lower the level of the sea every- where, and in accordance with the well-known hydrostatic law things would " right them- selves " on a cataclysmal scale. Every narrow strait in the world, every oceanic canal would become, for the time being, a roaring cataract. The Mediterranean would rush tumultuously out through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, and the overflow would flood the adjacent lands. The Straits of Dover would roar like Niagara, and all Kent, and the low- lying north-east corner of France, would be devastated. The isthmus of Panama might at the same time be swept away, for the narrow
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banks of the completed Panama Canal would certainly give way before the weight of the two oceans. All the rivers of the world would rush down in spate until they ran nearly dry from the increased outfall. The sea would recede from all the coasts. Along with this fall in the level of the sea would come tempests such as, since the appearance of man on the planet, the world has never known. For the sea-supported atmosphere would suck into its vacuum the whole weight of the over-lying air until pressure was equalised. And the climate of all the world would be reconstituted in new and probably inconvenient ways.
No. We cannot venture thus to change the face of creation. What we can and shall do is to make the best of it. In a hundred years' time many countries at present un- developed will be rich and populous. Canada, for one example, has an area greater than that of the United States, with a population smaller than the population of Greater London. And Canada, endowed as it is with almost every source of wealth, will before long become perhaps the richest country in the world. By this time next century it will also be one of the most populous. Siberia, again, with many fertile and salubrious tracts, will certainly have been more intelligently utilised than by making a vast prison of it. But when all the regions available for human habitation are populated
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and made use of, the centres of civilisation will probably lie very much where they lie now ; and here the congested populations will have found that they can no longer tolerate the waste of a neglected ocean. As we push outward from the centre of the continents, the seaboard will have to be utilised and extended. There is nothing to daunt the engineers of a hundred years hence in the project of erecting on the sea a vast floating city, fully as convenient as the present cities of terra firma, and, while vastly more healthful, quite substantial enough to resist storm and every motion of the sea, except the tides on which the city will rise and fall — tides which will no doubt furnish the motive power of many conveniences in ocean cities.
There are great advantages in a city thus founded, as compared with those we at present inhabit ; and we certainly shall not be able to neglect them. There will be no particular reason for economy of space or for insalubrious overcrowding (since the sea has no landlord), and breadth would make for stability as well as for convenience. Urban traffic will employ an entirely new light vehicle, the skimmer. It has been mentioned as a thing beyond doubt that the ships of a hundred years hence will no longer float in the sea, but ride on its surface, thus evading both the instability and the resistance at present so troublesome to
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marine engineers. As soon as the necessity arises for providing street traffic in the ocean city — when "the sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, ebbing and flowing, and the salt weed clings to the marble of her palaces " —invention will meet the demand, and light street waggons and carriages will everywhere glide about, performing the daily needs of the inhabitants. Something in the nature of break- waters will provide against wave-play and form an unequalled exterior boulevard ; and by means of an invention which will long since have been called for by the requirements of other localities, the air of dwelling-houses in the ocean city will be wholesomely freed from damp.
For we shall certainly not have failed to act upon our knowledge of the fact that irregularities in the proportion of atmospheric moisture are responsible for the unhealthiness of certain areas ; and we shall have learned, by means of the anhydrator, to provide any place with exactly the degree of damp or dry- ness necessary to health. The same apparatus, by desiccating the air to the extreme point, will keep the houses of an ocean city dry and thus do away with an objection which would make homes built on the water insufferable to-day.
If we have not wholly reformed throughout the world our system of land tenure, the
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conquered ocean will unquestionably relieve the tension which is created by it, and perhaps a radical change of this character will only become possible when the enormous advan- tages of it have been practically exemplified.
But there is another way in which the conquest of ocean ought to prove a great economic boon to the world. Except in the case of a few coal mines, with shafts sunk near the sea beach, we have hardly at all begun to investigate the contents of the ocean floor. There is, so far as I am aware, no particular reason to doubt that the constitution of the subterranean world is in most respects very much the same under the sea as under the land. Probably vast riches, as yet un- dreamed of, lie below the surface of the ocean and beneath its floor. There can be no question that the needs of the world will make us eager to tap them, as we should already have begun to, if any way could be dis- covered of overcoming the engineering difficulties involved. These difficulties, in the present state of our knowledge, may well appal the stoutest imagination. The problem pre- sented by the immense and paralysing air pres- sure in a mine at this great depth would have to be overcome. Even in some great terrestrial excavations already made the problem occurs : and where (as in river tunnels and elsewhere) men attempt to work in great air-pressures
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artificially induced, the phenomenon called caisson- disease occasions practical difficulty. But the mere fact of an achievement being almost inconceivable in the light of present knowledge and invention must not be allowed to put a clog upon a forecast of what next century may attain. It is a hypothesis which the reader has been invited to accept, not merely that discovery and invention will go on, but that they will go at a constantly-in- creasing pace. We must not, therefore, allow what may well seem, at the present day, insuperable engineering difficulties to forbid the belief that the undiscovered wealth of the earth below the sea will be tapped for the benefit of the new age. What minerals may lie there, a rich heirloom for the coming time, we can but roughly imagine. But enterprise and the world's necessities will spur us on to search them out, until the new people, deriving like a fresh Antaeus constant stores of strength from Mother Earth, will enter into possessions which must vastly relieve their necessities. Individual enterprise will solve the problems and reap its store of profits. But the ocean is no-man's land, and the people — perhaps a world-people, for this purpose at least not sub- divided into antagonistic communities — will beyond doubt take toll, for the relief of general taxation, from the earnings of the new mineralogy.
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In other ways, too, the sea itself will be made use of. We shall get our salt from it, the process of separation being electrolytic. Fish will probably be eaten later than any other form of animal food. But the chief gift of the sea to the life of the future will be the two gases of which water is composed — oxygen and hydrogen : and the other gas, chlorine, which forms half the salt, as well as the metal sodium which forms the other half, will probably have many new uses found for them. Liquefied oxygen will no doubt be our sole disinfectant. It will also replace the poisonous, noisome and destructive bleaching agents used to-day. Hydrogen, the lightest of all gases, will be another staple of commerce. It will (as we have elsewhere seen) probably be the only fuel employed, for its combustion furnishes the greatest heat terrestrially known, and its flame is smokeless and yields no poisonous by-product. Moreover, the evapora- tion of liquid hydrogen, by a sort of curious revenge, produces the greatest available cold. If anything in the nature of balloons should survive the century hydrogen will inflate them, and both our hydrogen and our oxygen will most likely be got by preference from the sea. There are many reasons for this preference. Probably there will be some advantage in the matter of expense, since the salts of ocean water would be a by-product of the operation,
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and it is conceivable that a use may be found for the rarer among them, which could only be obtained in satisfactory quantities by reducing to dryness huge amounts of water. And potable or spring waters will perhaps be too precious a commodity to be consumed unnecessarily. Distilled water could no doubt be used for drinking purposes, and bacterio- logically it is of course unexceptionable ; but there are certain objections to it, and though these may doubtless be overcome, natural waters have a value which cannot be ignored.
Thus the oceans of the world, as yet mere watery deserts, useful to hardly a calculable percentage of the people (and then only at the expense of the rest) will have become the world's inheritance, and its hoarded wealth will stave off the time — whose coming we must not ignore — when our world-capital begins to be exhausted. For that time must come. We are living upon the hoards which the womb of our mother the earth has borne to our father the sun. But our mother is, in respect at all events of mineral wealth, past the age of conception ; and every century brings us more rapidly near to the time when we shall, like spendthrifts, have lived out our capital. Already the end of coal is in sight. When, at the end of a vista however long, we begin to be able to foresee the exhaustion of other minerals, we shall face a problem appalling in
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its nature. Perhaps before our store of heat gives out and reduces earth to the state of a dead world like the moon, we shall already have exhausted our stock. No economies in the use of scrap metal and the re-employment of the material of machines which have been superseded can save us from ultimate metallic bankruptcy in a future calculated perhaps in thousands (but not many thousands) of years. Our only succour seems to lie in a conception for which (despite the efforts of some lively thinkers who have been obliged to ignore all but the least important difficulties of the subject) we have no material — the conception of means by which the cold depths of in- terplanetary space may be traversed. Even if we allow imagination, untrammelled by the most evident necessities of the case, to suggest a speed of transport computable only by astronomical analogies, we still lag behind anything which could serve this purpose, unless we concurrently believe that human life shall, by that time, be lengthened into centuries. Otherwise, however recklessly we may conceive of speed in interplanetary travel, man would almost require to live for many cen- turies in order to reach and return from any destination which would not inevitably destroy him by fire or cold when he arrived at it. Most likely man is for ever destined to accept the bounds of his own planet, and to be limited
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by its resources. In order that these resources may be utilised to the uttermost of his needs, the contents of the ocean floor must un- doubtedly be laid under contribution, and probably we shall not antedate this achieve- ment if we consider that it will have been at least entered upon a hundred years hence.
CHAPTER VII
THE MARCH OF SCIENCE
IN a forecast like the present it is impossible to avoid a certain amount of overlapping in different sections of the subject and a certain blending of topics in a single chapter. The attempt to differentiate consistently between the progress of science as science, and the concurrent advance of practical invention by which scientific discovery is turned to use would only involve needless repetition. I have already had occasion to suggest elements of material progress which presuppose the advance in pure science that would make them possible. Thus, in endeavouring to suggest what the methods of commerce and the con- dition of our cities are likely to be in the future it was necessary to conceive certain advances in our knowledge of what is rather clumsily called " wireless" telegraphy, and to predict the discovery of new and cheap methods of analysing water into its component gases as a source of fuel and as means for the production of electricity : and in order
1 06
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to avoid useless repetition it was found con- venient to work out in a rough manner the various ways in which the cheap and inex- haustible supplies of hydrogen and oxygen which I have imagined discovery to have placed at the disposal of invention would be employed in the arts. Similarly, when we interrogate imagination on the subject of scientific discovery itself, we shall be forced to think chiefly of the practical results likely to be achieved by it, and indeed there would otherwise be hardly any purpose to serve by the effort. What imports the greatest amount of complexity into the subject is the difficulty of conceiving the lines upon which science is likely to travel, unless we allow ourselves to be guided by the practical requirements of the future as far as we are able to foresee them. Imagination has indeed superabundant room in which to run riot when it endeavours to give form to the probabilities of scientific discovery; and the only danger is that effort may be wasted in purely fanciful directions, if it be not pretty securely tied down by some such artificial re- straint as the convention of keeping more or less strictly to the anticipation of discoveries likely to have immediate practical application.
For instance, there is hardly any end to the developments we might allow ourselves to imagine as arising out of the new theories, still in a probationary condition, as to the
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ultimate physical structure of the universe. Such conjectures might be followed indefinitely in several directions, and the resulting con- clusions would be more likely to err by timidity than by extravagance : but as there is no knowledge at present available which could serve as a guide to the probably-right, and as a warning against the probably-wrong, directions, it would be neither interesting nor useful to pursue them. Radium " the revealer," as Dr Saleeby has called it in one of those brilliant papers which fine imagination and delicate fancy have adorned with many another noble phrase and memorable image, opens the door to a whole world of new possibilities. Our whole conception of cosmic processes may have to be remodelled, in the light of those tiny scintillations which the spinthariscope has popularised. Already our notions con- cerning the nature of matter have been revolutionised. We are told that atoms, re- garded hitherto as the ultimate units of matter — so small that Lord Kelvin has calculated that if a drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth the atoms in it would be somewhere between the size of small shot and the size of cricket balls — are themselves made up of a stuff so almost infinitely more tenuous, that the particles of it within the atom are, relatively to their size, farther apart than the planets of the solar system. Nor is
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this all. These particles, commonly called electrons, if particles they can still be designated at all, were at first said to " carry " a charge of electricity. But it now seems that they are electricity itself. If this be true, we should seem to be on the point of bridging the void between what used to be called the eternal antithetics — matter and force : and whither this will lead us can only with the greatest caution be pre-imagined. In any case the consequences of this discovery, philosophical as well as scientific, are stupefy- ing in the possibilities they open up to the thinker as well as to the man of practical science. At last science begins to join hands with philosophy. What will be the philosophy of a hundred years hence, imagination pales before the effort of attempting to conceive.
But the working out of the revelations promised by radiology belongs rather to this end of the century than to the other. During the interval there can be no doubt that electricity, already man's chief handmaid, will have increased and perhaps completed her services to the race. When, as I ventured to suggest in a former chapter, inexhaustible and cheap " current " is yielded to us by some method of utilising the electrical reciprocity of the hydrogen and oxygen gases derived from water, doubtless all machinery will be electrically driven, all transport electrically
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propelled. Perhaps this discovery lies so far in the foreground of the future as to be irrelevant to any anticipations of the world's condition a hundred years hence. The full development of electrically-driven machinery lies in the middle distance, and the duration of the electrical age can hardly be pre- calculated with any greater exactness than the suggestion that it will probably have reached, or at all events approached, its end in about a century's time.
The most important problem connected with this subject is to imagine, if we can, how electri- cal power will be applied. It is quite evident that the device of long conductors, either over- head or below ground — the "live wires" of alarmed America — is too clumsy and too danger- ous to be long tolerated. It is indeed a public scandal that cables carrying an electrical charge capable of killing or paralysing at a touch should be suspended over the heads of the citizens, ex- posed to momentary breakage by snowfall, high wind, or the inevitable wear which careless inspectors may overlook : and the mere fact that a horse can occasionally set foot on a ground plate and fall dead from the contact shows that even the vaunted " conduit system " must not be regarded as anything but a strictly- temporary device. Some of the dangers of the underground electric wires arise out of the use of our present illuminating gas, when a pipe
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leaks into a manhole or inspection chamber, forming an explosive mixture of gas and air, which presently becomes ignited by an electric spark and blows up the whole affair. No doubt coal gas is within easily measurable distance of its end as a convenience of civilisation. But it is extremely probable that hydrogen and oxygen will be conveyed by mains to houses and public buildings during a long time : and it is hardly possible to believe that the mains will not some- times leak and be capable of letting out mix- tures far more dangerous on ignition than the mixture of coal gas and air, and still more dangerous because neither of the gases, nor the mixture of them, has any smell, unless indeed we should take the precaution of giving them one artificially. Whatever we may do, and we shall do much, to minimise the dangers of highly-evolved civilisation, accidents will always occur, and their violence will probably increase. We must pay our toll to the conveniences of life, and we shall of course compensate ourselves by a lower death-rate from diseases, many of which will no doubt in a hundred years' time have disappeared from the planet.
If we need any motive power other than electricity, or if we need motive power of some other kind to produce electricity, no doubt the explosive recombination of oxygen and hydro- gen, controlled by devices developed from existing gas-engines and petrol-engines, will be
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a starting-point : because coal will, probably before the complete exhaustion of the supply of it, have been found altogether too dirty and unhealthy a thing to use, at all events by way of combustion, though rumours are heard from time to time of new methods by which the stored energy of coal may be utilised directly, to the great economy of the material.1 In all sorts of ways the early years of the century will be employing themselves in seeking out new sources of man's chief necessity — power : and a hundred years hence we shall have entered upon the full inheritance of them.
But the obtaining of power is only one prob- lem of the mechanician. Of almost equal, if not quite equal, importance is that of applying power at the place where it is needed, and the careful reader will not have overlooked the fact that while we have been discussing the use of electricity as a source of power we have already been anticipating, and perhaps anticipating a good deal. For, when we now speak of machinery and locomotive engines being " driven" by electricity, we are really only em- ploying a sort of convenient periphrasis. All our electric machinery, all our electric railways, our " tuppeny " tubes and the horrible electric trams which make life almost intolerable in houses along many of the main roads out of London, are really driven by coal-burning steam 1 Ante, page 7.
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engines. In a few places (especially in the Niagara valley) waterfall power is used. But whatever the real source of power, electricity is only a means, more or less convenient, of transmitting it. Even electric launches, and slow-going electric broughams driven by ac- cumulators, only represent slightly more subtle examples of the electrical transmission of power. The ultimate source of power is always either a steam-engine or a waterfall. A few lecture- table toys and the like are the only existing examples of machinery in which the actual source of power is electricity. Even here, it may be objected, the actual source of power is not electricity, but chemical action in the bat- tery. But no contrivance of man is an ultimate source of power. Even a steam-engine is only a device for utilising the stored solar energy of coal. Of course man can no more create power than he can create matter : the stock of each in the universe is a fixed quantity. All that we are able to do is to harness to our use a part of the cosmic store. When I speak of electricity becoming hereafter a " source " of power, I am merely distinguishing between its use as a means of transmitting force already perceived as force in some other form (as where a dynamo- electric machine receives motion from a steam- engine or waterfall and turns this motion into electricity, which is conveyed by wires or rails to an electric dynamic engine that reconverts
H
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it into motion) and its use as a primary means of utilising the cosmic stores of force.
Before we arrive, therefore, at the point of using electricity as a source of power in itself, our mechanicians will have plenty to occupy them in the task of devising safer and more convenient methods of transmitting force, and even at the end of the century, supposing the use of electricity not to have been entirely superseded by the discovery of some entirely new force as yet not even conceivable, invention will doubtless be still busy with further im- provements in the transmission as well as in the production of electricity. It has been hinted that " wireless " transmission of power will no doubt by that time have become practicable, and Signor Marconi's achievement of wireless telegraphy was mentioned as a proof that such transmission is at least imaginable. In Mar- coni's invention an enormous electrical impulse is launched into the aether, and if the very smallest token of it can be " picked up " in any way at the receiving station, the wireless tele- gram is satisfactorily received. But the im- portant fact for our present purpose is that some product of the original impulse can be picked up : and though the effort of imagination required to see in this a starting-point for en- tirely new inventions, capable of gathering up a practicable modicum of the transmitted power in a form capable of being converted into motion,
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is severe, we shall bring but a poor imagina- tive equipment to a task so colossal as that of guessing what the next century will be capable of if we refuse to believe that something in the nature of Hertzian waves, or something propa- gated as these are propagated, can be used to carry impulse to machinery at a distance from the source of power. The imaginative faculty which boggles at this effort will probably over- look the fact that the mere transmission is only a part of the difficulty which is pretty sure to have been overcome by this time next century. It will not be enough to launch waves capable of being used where they are intended to be used. We must also discover how to launch them so that they may be incapable of being used anywhere else. I read the other day the report of a police-court case in which a man was charged with " stealing electricity " (which seems a rather doubtful indictment from the point of view of the lawyer) by obtaining the use of a public telephone station without paying the usual fee. The electricians of a hundred years hence will certainly have to find out how to prevent the purloining of wireless force, and perhaps the police will have to devise means of detecting this at present somewhat recondite crime. This question of wireless transmission lies within the province of discovery rather than that of invention. Before it can receive actu- ality we have to do more than utilise existing
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knowledge : we have to acquire new know- ledge.
In the meantime, portable energy will no doubt be achieved in ways other than electrical. Some very interesting compressed-air tools are already in limited use. Holes are drilled and rivets driven by little contrivances which have a store of force within themselves furnished by compressed air. One of the many uses of the cheap oxygen and hydrogen, and doubtless of cheaply liquefied gases of high-resisting power,1 will no doubt be to work various kinds of machinery. This use of liquid airs has been much derided, and indeed a good deal of non- sense has been written as to its possibilities, drawing from a recent and accomplished writer the remark that " The statements which have sometimes appeared in the daily papers, announcing impending revolutions in the methods of obtaining cheap power by the application of liquid air, have originated from an imperfect comprehension of the problems involved."2
In present conditions, and so far as we are able to see at present, liquefied gases are for a
1 That is to say, the gases which are most difficult to liquefy, and which consequently store up most energy in liquefying, viz., hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, as distin- guished from ammonia, carbon-dioxide,[chlorine, and other gases relatively easy to liquefy.
2 The Recent Development of Physical Science. By W. C. Whetham, F.R.S., 1904. London: John Murray.
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long time not likely to serve any greater mechanical purpose than that of furnishing a highly portable apparatus by which great power can be developed for a short time at any required place. It is easy to believe that it could not be otherwise employed with any economy, even when discovery has greatly simplified the now difficult process of lique- faction. But in regard to this matter, and to almost every other mechanical and engineering improvement suggested in the present work, it is of the first importance to remember that the conditions in which the work of the world a hundred years hence will be done are certain to differ very greatly from anything we know to-day ; and that procedures at present not merely out of proportion, but in themselves actually chimerical, will become perfectly work- able in the new circumstances of another century. No doubt the problems at present involved make many of the developments herein suggested almost laughable to those who examine the subject without imagination. But what could have been thought of a man who, when Oersted discovered the influence of a battery current on the compass needle, suggested that the discovery might, in much less than a hundred years, be practically de- veloped in such unforeseen ways as to pro- duce locomotive machines capable of carrying vast weight at a speed of perhaps a hundred
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miles an hour? He would have been told that such predictions " could only have originated from an imperfect comprehension of the problems involved." But we know that they would have been perfectly sound, though it would have been difficult to withhold assent from the derision which instructed hearers would have poured upon them. The effect of any scientific discovery can only be measured when we are in a position to judge of the con- ditions in which it may be applied, and the further discoveries which may affect it — a con- sideration which will help us against the danger of undue caution in estimating the possible developments of recent discovery when utilised in the conditions of the next century and re- inforced by inventions and discoveries yet to come,
A like caution will, however, teach us to restrain our expectations from the new know- ledge which radium appears to be gradually unfolding, not because there is any doubt that radio-activity will ultimately bring priceless gifts to civilisation, but because in our present ignorance of all but a few facts concerning it we can form no possible conjecture as to the lines these gifts will follow. Already we seem to have seen in some of the radium experi- ments one " element" turn into another. If this should develop until we acquire the power which used to be dreamed of as transmutation,
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the social and economic upheavals which would result beggar imagination.1
The photographic effect of Rontgen rays has already 2 been the subject of a suggestion, and even the facts now remotest from practical use in connection with the rays of various sorts so much discussed in the scientific newspapers will no doubt be utilised in a manner or in manners far removed from the limited employ- ment in therapeutics already found for them.
And indeed medicine, not the most progres- sive of modern sciences, will no doubt make vast strides during the period under discussion.
It would be altogether fallacious to forecast the position and probable achievements of medical science in a century's time on the line of simple development from the practice of to- day. The changes will be revolutionary rather than evolutionary. When it is remembered that only fifty years ago limbs were hacked
1 I do not forget that a good deal of what is on record as an account of experiments in transmutation is purely mystical writing, and that when Paracelsus and some of the French alchemists describe what appear to be chemical experiments they are in reality referring to something quite different. But the learned in these matters tell me that one of their chief difficulties arises from the fact that, con- temporary with the mystics, there were other investigators who, not having the key to the occult significance of the masters' writings, really devoted themselves to research, some valuable, if accidental, results of which have come down to us and are recorded in all text-books of chemistry.
2 Ante, page 79.
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from the quivering flesh of the sentient patient, held down by muscular assistants lest the violent struggles of his agony should embarrass the surgeon, and that wounds of all sorts festered and decayed until a hospital reeked with their impurity — in other words, that dis- coveries so great as anaesthesia and antisepsis are well within living memory — we need not hesitate to predict for the present century changes in medical and surgical science almost inconceivable by the light of our present attain- ment. Anaesthetics — of which the local kinds, as cocaine and eucaine, are of entirely recent use — represent an advance in one direction. Antiseptic surgery, which is the prevention and correction of blood and wound-poisoning by chemical disinfectants, represented an ad- vance of a different kind. But antisepsis is already on the point of being superseded by the far more rational and scientific method of asepsis, or the exclusion from open wounds of all the germs which can set up inflammation and festering. The change is typical.
The direction in which medicine is chiefly working at the present time is that of intro- ducing into the body one disease with the idea of excluding other diseases. It is con- ceived that cow-pox is antagonistic to small-pox, erysipelas possibly to cancer, and so on. All the talk in medical circles is of serum and attenuated virus. And, apart from animal
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products administered by injection, we cure or attempt to cure all diseases by administering poisons — animal, vegetable or mineral. Just as by antiseptics we poison the germ which causes festering and inflammation, so by drugs we attempt to poison disease — for all drugs are practically poisons. The principle of their administration is almost wholly empirical. If you ask a doctor why phenacetin reduces fever, it is impossible to get beyond a metaphysical explanation. He will reply that phenacetin reduces fever by lowering the blood pressure, or something of that kind. But this merely re-states the problem. Why does phenacetin lower blood pressure ? We do not know. The substitution of asepsis for antisepsis — that is, of cleanliness for disinfection — has hardly yet been perceived to be in a certain sense the greatest advance in therapeutics since Hippo- crates. It probably contains the germ of future medical treatment. Hereafter we shall not try to cast out devils of disease by other disease-germs only less devilish. We shall learn enough of the causes of disease to stop them at their source, and knowledge growing from more to more, which has taught us exactly how " matter in the wrong place " — of whatever sort — is the source of all disease, will also show how matter may generally be kept in its right place.
Although comparatively little progress has
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been made by the curative use of rays, other discoveries, of which we have even now passed the brink, will have an enormous effect on medicine and surgery. Already certain kinds of light cure rodent ulcer, one of the most hideous and terrible diseases, not by the im- portation of fresh substances into the body but by the modification of the tissues them- selves. When radiation has been fully studied it will almost certainly be found that the sun, which is the source of practically all terrestrial activity, has been showering upon us, ever since the homogeneous vapour which was the birth- stuff of the universe aggregated itself into worlds and suns and planets, rays which are capable of correcting every sort of disease- germination and, properly used, of preventing it. The absolute deadliness of unmodified sunlight to many sorts of disease - germs is recognised already. The value of sun-baths — the exposure of the whole body, undraped or only lightly covered, to the sunlight — is already discussed in connection with anaemia, chlorosis and the early stages of consumption. When we know just where all disease origin- ates, and why it develops, it seems likely that sunlight and oxygen its child will prevent nearly all disease and cure whatever disease accidentally arises. In place of temporary and dangerous expedients like antiseptics, serum and corrective poisons, we shall im-
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port nothing into the human organism, but only exclude what ought to be kept out, and modify into innocuousness what has found its way in.
A great part of the disease we call consti- tutional, as distinguished from infective, arises from food, either because the food itself is not free from disease, or because, from excess in quantity or error in choice, the food we take sets up the production of poisons in the course of digestion, and by yielding, for instance, lactic or uric acid to the blood causes rheumatism or gout, or by introducing into the stomach matter in a state of incipient decay, favours typhoid and other fevers.
When, for reasons already indicated, animal food has been eliminated from the menu one great source of disease will have been got rid of.
When we completely understand the nature of the infective and contagious diseases it seems well within the bounds of possibility that the systematic destruction of their germs may be carried far enough to remove them altogether from the planet.1 We have now, even by the
1 1 might have " boggled " (to use one of Mr Andrew Lang's stately colloquialisms) before this suggestion, but for a remark by Dr C. W. Saleeby, which may here be quoted, to keep me in countenance. "Malaria," he writes in Nova Medica^ Nov. 1904, "which causes more illness than any other disease, is already obsolescent. Tuberculosis, which causes more deaths than any other
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highly imperfect measure of quarantine and a period of muzzling (from which, on no evident ground except that it would interfere with the amusements of the governing class to include them, sporting dogs were excluded), apparently banished hydrophobia from Great Britain. If it prove to be the case that just as hydrophobia cannot arise spontaneously, but requires to be "started" by the entry into the blood of an animal of an existing infection, other infective diseases require pre-existing disease before they can arise, we may get rid of them altogether. The dream may appear a wild one. But it is not wilder than the dreams of a thinker who anticipated any one of a hundred common facts of to-day must have appeared to our great-great-grandfathers.
It is, of course, not to be supposed that disease can altogether be banished from a world so highly artificial as that of the next century will be. Undoubtedly the growth of sanitary science and the knowledge of the larger facts of hygiene, which is only now beginning to dawn upon us, will have a great
disease, can be disposed of, apparently, whenever the human race, now mightily smitten with internecine strife, decides that this campaign against a common foe is worth while. It takes some seconds to realise — or begin to realise — what the extinction of tuberculosis will signify in private and hospital practice. Yet the extermination of the last tubercle bacillus is an event quite certainly hidden in the womb of time — time pregnant by science."
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influence in correcting some of the evils which over-civilisation at present entails. But the very progress of the art of healing will no doubt have the effect of perpetuating in a manner the existence of illness. Every forward step in medicine serves to save alive some weakling that in a less advanced civilisation would die ; and these survivors, possibly propagating their species, will have weak descendants, on whom whatever possibility of disease continues to exist will certainly fasten. The discovery of means by which we can make a weak " consti- tution " into a strong one is perhaps the least likely of medical innovations. It would be altogether contrary to the general spirit of the times anticipated to expect that we shall have steeled our hearts to the destruction of feeble lives as dangerous to the race. We are much more likely to go on finding better means to perpetuate them : and this means that there will always be work for the doctor, though the infective fevers will have been banished from the earth. Medicine, therefore, will still aspire. But apart from what are called occupation- diseases, caused by certain manufacturing pro- cesses (of which the more deadly, as phosphorus match-making, lead-glazing of earthenware and the manufacture of enamelled iron will before long certainly be abolished), the elabor- ate machinery and rapid travel of the new age must needs exact a certain toll of death and
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mutilation. The surgeon will have more to do than the physician. Frightful accidents will occur from time to time. The maim, the halt and the blind must pay the price of pro- gress. And it is hardly possible that nervous diseases and insanity, incident to the pressure of civilisation, can be eliminated. But certainly the alleviations of all but the last, and even of that except in its extreme expression as total dementia, will have advanced to a high standard. We shall no doubt, for instance, have discovered means of so acting on the sensory system that we shall be able innocuously and temporarily to paralyse at any desired spot the nerves which transmit pain. Thus, during convalescence, the injured will suffer no discomfort except that of confinement, and our means of amusing the patient by talking machines that will read and sing to him, and the theatroscopes that will project before him moving and coloured pictures of life or the play, will make the sick bed almost a paradise.
As we have seen that, apart from the sentimental reasons which have been sug- gested,1 animal and flesh foods must, for economical reasons, have been abandoned long before the end of the century, the grazing of cattle being far too expensive a method of utilising the soil, we may be quite sure that the sciences connected with agriculture will 1 Ante, page 34.
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receive far greater attention than they now enjoy. It will grow more important with every decade to obtain the greatest possible tribute from the portions of land, steadily decreasing in area, which can be spared from the growing needs of the builder. Every discovery of the chemist which can be laid under contribution by the agriculturist will eagerly be seized upon. Every means which can be devised for replac- ing what we take from the soil will be utilised to the full : and of course the inevitable dis- appearance of the horse as a means of traction, and of the flocks and herds which now yield manure, and perhaps the gradual exhaustion of the minerals (as rock phosphates) from which artificial soil enrichers are prepared, will make it necessary to rearrange, on safe, economical and convenient lines, our present plans of sanitation. The insane wastefulness of draining into the sea cannot long be tolerated. Every conceivable means of con- serving our mundane capital will have to be made use of. In other ways science will come to the rescue. The farmer's sufferings from the depredations of vermin of various kinds will perhaps never be much affected by inven- tion, because all nature is so curiously inter- dependent that the eradication of one pest has an awkward way of intensifying some greater evil : we destroy birds and are punished by a plague of caterpillars. The accidents of
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climate, too, can perhaps only be obviated in a very small measure, though the science of meteorology, constantly being helped by facilities for better observation-reporting, will unquestionably help the agriculturist by giv- ing him timely warnings. It seems hardly possible to doubt that the eccentricities of climate and the unexpected shifting of the rainy season in Manchuria during the Russo- Japanese war must have been caused by the vast atmospheric disturbances created by days and weeks of cannonading : and of course it is an old theory that heavy gun-fire " brings down the rain." Military historians say that the number of wet-day battles altogether exceeds any expectation which could have been formed without allowing for effects of this sort. When science has pondered upon the subject, and instituted in an ordered manner experiments of a kind hitherto never taken very seriously, it may very well be that some means less violent than the detonation of explosives may be discovered by the practical meteorologist for creating disturbances in the atmosphere ; and while it may not be possible to prevent excessive rainfall at inconvenient times, it seems easy to conceive that when there is moisture in the atmosphere we may be able to bring it down as rain. Of course this is a very different thing from breaking up droughts : and artificial rain-making cannot in
iliC*
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itself be anything but a momentary expedient. The effects of deforestation have for some time been observed and the plan of improving waterless areas by the contrary process is already discussed. While it seems rather a <c large order " to undertake to meddle with the balance of atmospheric composition on a large scale, especially as we know so little of the conditions that even success might very possibly be attended by unforeseen and perhaps calamitous results, there is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion that we might adopt means on a vast scale for increas- ing oceanic evaporation and, utilising the exact foreknowledge of winds and air currents which we shall certainly have achieved, bring moisture and rain to arid tracts or countries suffering from drought. The operation would no doubt require to be stupendous, but the next century is not going to be afraid of stupendous opera- tions ; and anticipating vast and unforeseen progress in meteorology, it would be hazardous to believe that no practical use will be made of such progress.
While our knowledge and mastery of the planet we possess, and of its forces, are being steadily advanced by scientific discovery, and the researches of the pure scientist are con- stantly yielding practical results at first un- dreamed of, it is impossible to doubt that man's knowledge of himself will make equal i
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progress. And it is not alone the physical constitution of man that will be interrogated. Everything assists the belief that this century will be among other things the century of psychical advance. We appear to be on the verge of great discoveries concerning the human mind, and especially concerning the relation of body to consciousness. Hypnotism has only during a comparatively short time been the subject of systematic observation, even in France ; but at any time during the last ten years results have been achieved which, if foreseen a century ago, would certainly have produced a widespread recru- descence of belief in witchcraft. What the developed science of a hundred years hence will be capable of would certainly be a great deal more surprising if we could foresee it to- day. It is reported from the Salpetriere Hospital that a woman, under hypnosis, has had the existence of a picture on a blank sheet of paper suggested to her with such vividness that, on the suggestion being revived at a subsequent period, even after a considerable interval, she was able to detect that the " picture" was upside down, the blank paper having been actually reversed. This phe- nomenon is attributed to a great accentuation of the sense of vision produced by hypnotism, it being supposed that the paper, perfectly blank on ordinary observation, had really some
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local irregularity of colour or surface which the sharpened vision of the subject was able, unconsciously, to utilise. What secrets in the mechanism of the senses may not this fore- shadow ? Without any recourse to hypnotism, as we at present understand hypnotism, im- pressions have, in a number of instances suffi- cient to exclude all possibility of collusion or error, been conveyed from one mind to another without the use of any of the ordinary means of communication : and it is shown in experi- ments seriously conducted by trained observers that the faculties of thus communicating and receiving impressions can be steadily culti- vated. In other words, it would appear that human consciousness possesses some sort of emanation, and although certain " ray " experi- ments possibly connected with the subject have not received universal acceptance, it is evident that the future is going to enlarge considerably our knowledge of the nature of mental process. At present we know nothing — and it has been said with some rashness that we must always remain in a like ignorance — of the interval between sense and consciousness. We know how the ear receives air-vibrations, how it collects and conducts them to the auditory nerves, carefully protecting itself, by the action of beautifully ordered springs and cushions, from the effects of vibrations violent enough to be dangerous to its own integrity. But even
CHAPTER VIII
EDUCATIOK A HUHDRED TEARS HENCE
ALLOWING, as every competent thinker must allow, a foil measure of validity to the con- tention that social developments are matters of slow growth and gradual attainment rather than of sudden and catastrophic change ; ad- mitting that even in die sphere of scientific discovery and mechanical invention changes occur much more gradually than a cursory glance at individual achievements would suggest; recognising that many of the most remarkable changes whose arrival in the past is the only possible valid guide to anticipation of similar or kindred changes in the future ; it is still a condition of such anticipation that we should take account of causes likely to be operative in altering the rate at which the world will move. To allow that social im- provements generally have the air of occurring almost automatically is not to conceive that they are without cause. Neither can it be believed by anyone who has studied the history of such movements in the past, or
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watched them in current progress, that the rate of development is everywhere and at all periods the same. There have been eras of almost complete moral, and even of almost complete mechanical, stagnation in the history of the world. There have been other eras of almost violent reformation and reconstruction. To reason as if these characteristics were arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the physiognomy of society, to be content with laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts without attempting to learn anything from them of their causes, is to neglect the only important lesson which either history or observation is capable of teaching. When, therefore, an enormous acceleration in a rate of progress already unprecedented in the records of society has been predicted for the next hundred years of human history, it is evident that this anticipation must have been based upon some estimate of forces calculated to be operative in producing ac- celeration.
So far as scientific or material progress is concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall move forward with increasing memtmfmm, because every discovery and every invention tends automatically to facilitate fresh attain- ment, and the very growth of population must act in the same way, as must also the struggle for existence, As there are every year more
CHAPTER VIII
EDUCATION A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
ALLOWING, as every competent thinker must allow, a full measure of validity to the con- tention that social developments are matters of slow growth and gradual attainment rather than of sudden and catastrophic change ; ad- mitting that even in the sphere of scientific discovery and mechanical invention changes occur much more gradually than a cursory glance at individual achievements would suggest ; recognising that many of the most remarkable changes whose arrival in the past is the only possible valid guide to anticipation of similar or kindred changes in the future ; it is still a condition of such anticipation that we should take account of causes likely to be operative in altering the rate at which the world will move. To allow that social im- provements generally have the air of occurring almost automatically is not to conceive that they are without cause. Neither can it be believed by anyone who has studied the history of such movements in the past, or
EDUCATION, A.D. 2000 135
watched them in current progress, that the rate of development is everywhere and at all periods the same. There have been eras of almost complete moral, and even of almost complete mechanical, stagnation in the history of the world. There have been other eras of almost violent reformation and reconstruction. To reason as if these characteristics were arbitrarily or miraculously imposed upon the physiognomy of society, to be content with laboriously unintelligent estimation of the facts without attempting to learn anything from them of their causes, is to neglect the only important lesson which either history or observation is capable of teaching. When, therefore, an enormous acceleration in a rate of progress already unprecedented in the records of society has been predicted for the next hundred years of human history, it is evident that this anticipation must have been based upon some estimate of forces calculated to be operative in producing ac- celeration.
So far as scientific or material progress is concerned, it is obvious enough that we shall move forward with increasing momentum, because every discovery and every invention tends automatically to facilitate fresh attain- ment, and the very growth of population must act in the same way, as must also the struggle for existence. As there are every year more
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men and women working on scientific research and on mechanical invention, the results must be progressively greater every year ; and as the rewards of success are increased by the growing demand resulting from a growing population, it is evident that the incentives to industry in this respect are proportionately liable to increase. But the ethical progress of the world is actuated by forces entirely different, and what makes for mechanical im- provement may very easily be conceived — in fact has actually been conceived by one rather conspicuous prophet — to operate adversely upon the moral future of the race.
No secret, however, has been made of the present writer's belief that our descendants a hundred years hence will have made moral progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical progress of which the anticipation is likely to be contested by no reasonably imaginative observer. This ethical improvement, gradual, and momentarily imperceptible as it may be, necessarily has causes which must now, how- ever tentatively and however cursorily, be examined.
That these causes will be powerful, con- tinuous in action and based upon the funda- mentals of human character, is evident. That in their operation they will be opposed by other influences not less easy to foresee is equally manifest. What we have to precog-
MORALITY AND MOTIVES 137
nise are the net results likely to be achieved by the interaction of opposing forces, of which those tending to improvement are confidently believed the stronger.
The most powerful of all moral influences in the future will undoubtedly be the reform of education, not merely by the improvement of its methods in various departments, but also, and with much more importance, in the general spirit with which its objects will be conceived. But'in order to affirm that this reform will occur, we must first demonstrate that the grounds- upon which it is anticipated are adequate* We must, in the terms of the formula above proposed, be satisfied that they are in harmony with the fundamentals of human character.
If there be any human motive of which something approaching universality can be predicted — quod semper > quod ubique> quod ab omnibus — it is that of parental solicitude. No progenitor of children, however little amenable to high aspirations, is wholly free from the wish that his offspring shall grow up to be wiser, stronger, better, more prosperous than himself.* The innate hopefulness of the race expressed in the arid comment that, in his own estimation, "man never is, but always to be blest," is often discouraged by the time a man's children are beginning to grow up, especially in these days of late marriage and
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deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of us have realised only too acutely by the time we are forty, that we have more or less failed in the ambitions which seemed so easy of future attainment when we were twenty-five, aspiration begins to cast a golden light upon the career of our children, and it is to the successes and the fame of our first-born that we look for consolation in the failure which, for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade. Romance, celebrity, even perhaps worldly reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves ; but these dear hands that a little time ago we held while the first tottering steps of babyhood were being tried, shall return to us hereafter with the laurel in them that we have never plucked. Perhaps we shall not live to see it on our child's brow, but what of that? Our confident prevision of this glory is what we console ourselves withal : this, though we hardly know it, is our True Romance : —
" The comfortress of unsuccess, To bid the dead good-night."
Neither in the material and the intellectual spheres alone do we aspire more^nobly for our children than for ourselves. Not success and not fame limit our demand of Fate, that she repair in our children the injustice of which we ourselves cease to complain. We want them to be better men and women than we have
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been. To put the thing on its lowest ground (and nothing but the lowest motives ever seem to be accorded the smallest validity by the more conspicuous among recent vaticinators of human action) it behoves us to make the best we can of our children's morals, if we are presently in old age likely to be dependant upon them. But for those who, like Malvolio, " think nobly of the soul," it is sufficient to rely upon the manifested predilection of every parent in order to be convinced that the education of the future will be moralised as well as rationalised through the natural emotions of man. Only the dullest and most turgid imagination will consent to believe that the horrible conditions of competitive struggle will be permitted to foster only the lower faculties, as greed, selfishness, unscrupulous cunning and subtle evasiveness, at the expense of all the finer characteristics of man. There is no cynic so base as would deliberately seek the fortune of his sons in the inculcation of chicane. Struggle must sharpen all our intel- lects as life grows yearly more difficult, but one by-product of this attrition will be the increased morality with which the education of each gen- eration successively arising will be conceived.
Pausing for a moment to remark, in regard to the methods in detail by which the improve- ment of education will most likely be sought, that to foresee what is probable is not neces-
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sarily to endorse it as ideal, and that the object of this book is not to formulate Utopia, but to predict the consequences implied by existing forces after the latter have been during a stated time in operation; and admitting that no reform ever practised within the recorded history of man has been without drawbacks inherent in its own constitution, it may be said at once that the work of instruction is capable of mechanical and instrumental improvement not less considerable than any other labour to be undertaken by ourselves and our successors. Even within a lifetime's limits all sorts of appli- ances for assisting the mind of the learner to apprehend the facts sought to be learnt have been invented, and our children, as we all know, are much more easily taught than we were our- selves. The laudator temporis acti is always pretty ready to depreciate the value of these improvements, and perhaps it is natural enough in most of us to find it difficult to believe that any plan of teaching can be better for our children than the one which produced results so pleasingly exemplified by ourselves. But at all events, it will be generally, if a little grudgingly, admitted that any form of apparatus capable of saving time and trouble in teaching is capable of being ranked as an improvement. Unquestionably appliances having this object will be constantly invented and used during the present century. For instance, it is hardly
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conceivable that something less than perfection in the teaching of a foreign pronunciation by the mouth of the best teacher who can be hired for the work will content us, when perfected talking-machines presently enable us to give examples of the still better speech. Evidently a boy would learn to speak French with a purer accent by listening to a phonograph which, freed of the present tin-trumpet timbre and whirring, repeated the speech of the Comtdie Franfaise, than by hearing an ordinary master read aloud. To say this is not to suggest that professors of languages will be dispensed with ; but their teaching can be thus supplemented. Similarly the use of magic-lanterns and kineto- scopic pictures is capable of improving greatly upon the blackboard and chalk still used. But the plan of education in itself is so greatly more important to be foreseen than the mechanism by which the details can be worked out, and the latter can with so very little difficulty be imagined by anyone interested in them, that the reader shall not be troubled with any discussion of this branch of the subject, but will rather be asked to concentrate his attention upon the moral and intellectual aspects of it.
Conceiving, what I have all along en- deavoured to show is reasonable to conceive, that all social institutions will be governed with ever-increasing intelligence and rationality as time goes on, and that they could not possibly
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be tolerated otherwise, it is easy to see that education as hitherto and at present practised would never do for our grandchildren, let alone for our more advanced descendants a hundred years hence. To begin with, parents in that era would certainly consider it hopelessly and criminally unethical, if not actively immoral. Projects of reform, especially in morals, are often dismissed as visionary, because it is pointed out that no changes can take place in the social order which do not appeal directly to the self-interest of the individual. In other words, there is no mainspring of social action except aggregated selfishness. Without delay- ing to examine the validity of the belief, it maybe said at once that its full acceptance is no obstacle to the admission of the whole case on which is founded the belief that education will be con- ducted chiefly with a view to its moral effect at the period I am attempting to describe. The very circumstances on which writers rely, who predict the ethical deterioration of man, are those which make the ethical reform of education in- evitable. Precisely in proportion as co mpetition tends to harden and debase, there will arise the unavoidable necessity for deliberate counter- action of this tendency, resulting, as the effect of the measures necessitated becomes felt, in the changes of commercial and political conditions already1 predicted. If we consider at all 1 Ante, Chapter III.
AMENITIES OF EDUCATION 143
thoughtfully the necessities of a hundred years hence, it is not difficult to foresee the general lines upon which they are likely to be met — lines not necessary to be accepted as represent- ing a perfect or ideal state, but broadly indicat- ing the methods which the effect of visible tendencies will by that time demand of a practical people.
Here, as everywhere else, the only safe guidance as to the practice of the future must be sought in the tendencies of the present. The tendency most forcibly in evidence during recent times is that in favour of softening the former acerbities of education. Whereas the schoolhouse of half a century ago was something like a penitentiary in the way it was conducted, the schoolhouse of to-day is managed as much like a place of recreation as it possibly can be. At all events, recreation is at least as assiduously cultivated as study, and the candidate for an under-mastership who has a good cricket record will find employment a good deal more easily than one with a double-first. If there be any complaint of public and other upper-class schools at the present time — and there is room for plenty of complaint — it is more often that games are too much insisted upon than that brains are overtaxed. There is a visible re- action in regard to this ; but it is not to be regarded as a reaction in favour of the old draconic methods. On the contrary, " the grow-
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ing sentimentality of the age " steadily de- mands amenity of treatment for the fortunate ^offspring of the twentieth century. The late James Payn, sanest and kindliest of men, was never tired of denouncing what he called the barbarous and indecent corporal punishments of Eton. He used to say that if a picture of an Eton boy being birched were published in the Illustrated London News no boy would ever be birched again, and I believe that he tried to get either Mr Latey or Mr Shorter to insert such a picture. Be this as it may, what he said was perfectly true. I shall have something to say presently on this same question of school discipline : meantime it may with perfect safety be predicted of the master's cane a hundred years hence that it will be found only in museums, and (whether rightly or wrongly) be regarded as a relic of degrading barbarism. One reason why corporal punishment will have to be abolished is that boys and girls will cer- tainly be educated together instead of apart. As we could hardly cane girls (and it would be of very little use if we could) we shall assuredly have to get on without caning their masculine schoolmates.
I suppose that few will contest the statement that the religious teaching practised in schools at the present time not only has very little to do with the question of morality but tends distinctly, except in Roman Catholic seminaries
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and some few non-conforming colleges where a special kind of education is given, to have less and less connection therewith. Whatever moral effect " schooling" has upon the adolescent is recognisably and recognisedly due to the " tone " of the school itself, that is, to public opinion among the taught, and only in- directly to anything which emanates from the teachers. Assuredly a proficient knowledge of Biblical history has no ethical effect greater than a proficient knowledge of Greek mythology (at least of so much of it as is properly selected for school use), and we have it on the authority of Mr E. H. Cooper, a very entertaining if not particularly sound writer on children, that even " Confirmation " classes are by no means uni- form in promoting a religious sentiment in boys.1
The moral advantages of education, there- fore, tend to be found in the effect of public opinion and the general "tone" of a school. It is discovered in practice that direct moral inculcation is not very successful. It is to be assumed that the ingenuity of future paeda- gogues will be devoted to the discovery of the best ways in which indirect moral influence can be cultivated. In view of the high importance which will evidently be attached to such in- fluence, we may take it for granted that it is not in connection with any single branch of
1 The Twentieth Century Child. Chapter III. K
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tuition that it will be sought for, but that it will be root and branch of the whole scheme of educational work. One very powerful assist- ance will be rendered to this by the system of co-education.
It is quite certain that boys and girls will always be educated together a hundred years hence. The tendency of the sexes to become less different intellectually is a known fact of sociology.1 It carries with it an inevitable tendency to dispense with the separation of the sexes in education. Wherever co-education has been tried its effects have been excellent. The presence of female students in medical colleges has had a markedly reformative in- fluence on the manners and moral tone of medical student life, not long ago the opprobrium of civilisation. The advantages to a parent of being able to send his sons and his daughters to one place of instruction, and to the children themselves of the companionship and mainten- ance of family relations thus afforded, are equally obvious. In one other respect, which can only be touched upon lightly here, the system of joint education must be enormously beneficial, at all events to boys, and greatly beneficial to their sisters. Every competent schoolmaster is acquainted with special difficulties liable to arise about the age of puberty. The monastic seclusion of the school-
1 Spencer : Study of Sociology.