No secret, however, has been made of the present writer's belief that our descendants a hundred years hence will have made moral progress quite as remarkable as the mechanical progress of which the anticipation is likely to be contested by no reasonably imaginative observer. This ethical improvement, gradual, and momentarily imperceptible as it may be, necessarily has causes which must now, however tentatively and however cursorily, be examined. That these causes will be powerful, continuous in action and based upon the fundamentals of human character, is evident. That in their operation they will be opposed by other influences not less easy to foresee is equally manifest. What we have to precognise are the net results likely to be achieved by the interaction of opposing forces, of which those tending to improvement are confidently believed the stronger. The most powerful of all moral influences in the future will undoubtedly be the reform of education, not merely by the improvement of its methods in various departments, but also, and with much more importance, in the general spirit with which its objects will be conceived. But in order to affirm that this reform will occur, we must first demonstrate that the grounds upon which it is anticipated are adequate. We must, in the terms of the formula above proposed, be satisfied that they are in harmony with the fundamentals of human character. If there be any human motive of which something approaching universality can be predicted--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus--it is that of parental solicitude. No progenitor of children, however little amenable to high aspirations, is wholly free from the wish that his offspring shall grow up to be wiser, stronger, better, more prosperous than himself. The innate hopefulness of the race expressed in the arid comment that, in his own estimation, "man never is, but always to be blest," is often discouraged by the time a man's children are beginning to grow up, especially in these days of late marriage and deferred parenthood. Realising, as most of us have realised only too acutely by the time we are forty, that we have more or less failed in the ambitions which seemed so easy of future attainment when we were twenty-five, aspiration begins to cast a golden light upon the career of our children, and it is to the successes and the fame of our first-born that we look for consolation in the failure which, for ourselves, we no longer hope to evade. Romance, celebrity, even perhaps worldly reward, we can no longer expect for ourselves; but these dear hands that a little time ago we held while the first tottering steps of babyhood were being tried, shall return to us hereafter with the laurel in them that we have never plucked. Perhaps we shall not live to see it on our child's brow, but what of that? Our confident prevision of this glory is what we console ourselves withal: this, though we hardly know it, is our True Romance:--