Henry Herbert never dies, he was here before Adam took form from out the dust of Eden, and he will be the last man to leave this earth when the last trumpet sounds, and I have not the slightest doubt that he will then question the wisdom of the Almighty. He will question the wisdom of all things new, and yet, to-day, the world is groaning for novelty, for material growth means also material decay. Though very ordinary men can build middens, it is only the extraordinary man who can shift these piles of refuse—accumulations of old traditions, customs and accepted things. To me the moral of this centenary is not the power of steam, but the power of the will of man. George Stephenson triumphed over all difficulties, because he was possessed of a will to win. The stronger opposition grew the more mighty grew his will. Protean ignorance has, therefore, its virtue; it renders progress difficult to attain; it is the whetstone of genius. When we realize this, in place of wringing our hands in lamentation when Henry Herbert beats his last against our door, we open it and look at him, and laugh, and then close it and go on with our work—in one word, we persevere. Laughter and Perseverance, surely these two are the shield and sword of progress. THE CONQUEST OF THE ELYSIAN FIELDS THE EQUATION OF POWER AND MOVEMENT Power and Movement, these are the foundations of civilization and the sire and dam of progress, and before the days of Watt, Fulton and Stephenson, all Anglo-Saxons, how shallow were they laid; so shallow that their social and industrial superstruction is, to-day, difficult to visualize, let alone to understand. Here is a little glimpse, and if not a very dramatic one, yet one which is apt to make us wonder at this lost world of little more than a century ago, a world all but obscured in clouds of steam. In 1770, Adam Smith wrote (and be it remembered that for fifty years after this date the picture remains true) the following:— “A broad-wheeled wagon attended by two men, and drawn by eight horses, in about six weeks’ time carries and brings back between London and Edinburgh near four ton weight of goods. Upon two hundred tons of goods, therefore, carried by the cheapest land-carriage from London to Edinburgh, there must be charged the maintenance of a hundred men for three weeks, and both the maintenance, and, what is nearly equal to the maintenance, the wear and tear of four hundred horses, as well as of fifty great wagons.” To-day, when the trans-Siberian railway is in working order, a man can travel in the same time, with four tons of baggage if he wishes, from London to Tokio and back. Edinburgh is four hundred miles from London, and Tokio is some eight thousand miles from this same city; such has been the expansion of movement and the contraction of space, and to-morrow aircraft may reduce the time taken to a fortnight.