Humanitarian sentiment, also, is terribly misguided. “Why always the benefit of the future, has the present no claim upon us?” I have been asked. Assuredly all sentient life, and therefore pre-eminently all human life, in which sentiency is so incommensurably intensified by self-consciousness, the power of “looking before and after,” has a claim upon us: but the question could have been asked by no one whose imagination had been worthily employed. Our posterity will in due course be as actual and present as we, their deeds and sufferings and hopes as actual and present as ours. They outnumber us as the ocean outweighs a raindrop; to avert evil from one of them is as much as to relieve evil in one of us,--how much more to prevent the misery of five in the next generation, fifty in the next and unnumbered hosts beyond? To serve the future of the race is not to benefit a fiction: the men and women of a hundred and a thousand years hence will be as real as we. And to serve the future is to put out our talent at compound interest a thousand-fold compounded. The weak imagination would rather build a sanatorium for consumptives and see it filled with grateful patients. This is a palpable, sensible good, for which the meanest visual faculty suffices: but the strong imagination would rather open the closed windows of nurseries or work at the mechanical problems of ventilation, aye, or even at the structure of the bacteriological microscope--finding the spectacle, in the mind's eye, of healthy men and women fifty years hence as grateful and as real a reward as the sight of a sanatorium in the present. The pace of progress will be incalculably hastened when men, whether workers or bequeathers or administrators, enlarge their imaginations so as to perceive that the future will be, and therefore indeed is, as real as the present.[1] I appeal to the reason of the kind-hearted reader. Would you rather make one man or child happy now, or two or a thousand a century hence?