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 necessary 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 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 [3] to the rapidly-changing conditions 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. 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"