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promised (and they are already quite easily presageable) by wireless telegraphy will give us, and what they will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined; what their effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured even to hint at.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,