the society of a century
ago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like to live then.
In inviting you now to consider certain reflections upon this subject
which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather follow than
divert the course of your own thoughts."

Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which he
nodded assent and turned to me.

"Mr. West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightly
embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr. Barton is laying
down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon. She will
connect us with Mr. Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and I can
still promise you a very good discourse."

"No, no," I said. "Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr. Barton
has to say."

"As you please," replied my host.

When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voice of
Mr. Barton had ceased abruptly. Now at another touch the room was once
more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had already
impressed me most favorably.

"I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as a
result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leave
us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one brief
century has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity.

"Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and
the world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is not
greater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhaps
not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this country
during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century and the
relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the nineteenth,
or between the England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria.
Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then, as now, afford
any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet instances like
these afford partial parallels for the merely material side of the
contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is when
we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast that we find ourselves
in the presence of a phenomenon for which history offers no precedent,
however far back we may cast our eye. One might almost be excused who
should exclaim, 'Here, surely, is something like a miracle!'
Nevertheless, when we give over idle wonder, and begin to examine the
seeming