in the prospects of this world to set a man's heart
singing. Good is rising and evil sinking like oil and water in a bottle.
The race is improving. There are far fewer criminal convictions. There
is far more education. People sin less and think more. When I meet a
brutal looking fellow I often think that he and his type may soon be
as extinct as the great auk. I am not sure that in the interest of the
'ologies we ought not to pickle a few specimens of Bill Sykes, to show
our children's children what sort of a person he was.

And then the more we progress the more we tend to progress. We advance
not in arithmetical but in geometrical progression. We draw compound
interest on the whole capital of knowledge and virtue which has been
accumulated since the dawning of time. Some eighty thousand years are
supposed to have existed between paleolithic and neolithic man. Yet
in all that time he only learned to grind his flint stones instead of
chipping them. But within our father's lives what changes have there not
been? The railway and the telegraph, chloroform and applied electricity.
Ten years now go further than a thousand then, not so much on account
of our finer intellects as because the light we have shows us the way to
more. Primeval man stumbled along with peering eyes, and slow, uncertain
footsteps. Now we walk briskly towards our unknown goal.

And I wonder what that goal is to be! I mean, of course, as far as this
world is concerned. Ever since man first scratched hieroglyphics upon an
ostracon, or scribbled with sepia upon papyrus, he must have wondered,
as we wonder to-day. I suppose that we DO know a little more than they.
We have an arc of about three thousand years given us, from which to
calculate out the course to be described by our descendants; but that
arc is so tiny when compared to the vast ages which Providence uses in
working out its designs that our deductions from it must, I think, be
uncertain. Will civilisation be swamped by barbarism? It happened once
before, because the civilised were tiny specks of light in the midst of
darkness. But what, for example, could break down the great country in
which you dwell? No, our civilisation will endure and grow more complex.
Man will live in the air and below the water. Preventive medicine will
develop until old age shall become the sole cause of death. Education
and a more socialistic scheme of society will do away with crime. The
English-speaking races will u