To anyone who has considered at all attentively the enormous material advances of the nineteenth 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 indeed, 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 compared 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. 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 infantile stirring.
What the developments promised (and they are already quite easily presageable) by wireless telegraphy will give us, and what they will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined ; what their effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured even to hint at.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 remarkable in the numerous and highly-varied experiments 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 fully perceived that the moral constitution of man himself is quite certain to be profoundly modified, not alone by the influence of a 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 enlightened man of the present day is so radically different in all his ideas from a similar individual 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 day are, they are perhaps hardly less inadequate 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 infection 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 resuscitated, 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 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 farmhouses. I should not like to attempt the conjecture, 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
