The military conqueror had his day of surpassing glory and departed, to leave the world only a little worse than he found it. But the mechanical inventor left a heritage that was to add day by day to the wealth and happiness of humanity, supplying millions of artificial hands, and making possible such beneficent improvements as no previous age had dreamed of. Tasks that human hands had performed slowly, laboriously, and inadequately, were now to be performed swiftly, with ease, and well by the artificial hands provided with the aid of the new power. Where carts drawn by horses had toiled slowly across the land, and ships driven by the wind had drifted slowly through the waters, massive trains of cars were to hurtle to the four corners of the earth with inconceivable speed, and floating palaces were to course the waters with almost equal defiance to the limitations of time and space. And then there came that still weirder conquest of time and space, wrought by the electric current. The moment when man first spoke with man from continent to continent in defiance of the oceans, marked the dawning of that larger day when all mankind shall constitute one brotherhood and all peoples but a single nation. Within a half century the sun of that new day has risen well above the horizon, and far sooner than even the optimist of to-day dare predict with certainty, it seems destined to reach its zenith. But here again we verge upon the dangerous field of prophecy. Let us turn from it and cast an eye back across the most wonderful of centuries, contrasting the conditions of to-day in each of a half-dozen fields of the world's work, with the conditions that obtained at the close of the eighteenth century. Such a brief survey will show us perhaps more vividly than we could otherwise be shown, how vast has been the progress, how marvelous the development of civilization, in the short decades that have elapsed since the coming of the Age of Steam.