"For this nineteenth century is not the last century; nor is its civilization the last civilization; nor its ideals the last ideals! The twentieth is coming! And before it ends, it may be that this nineteenth will seem strangely distant! Men may then look over its mental wares as, after twenty years, one might look over a box containing the clothes of a dead elder sister, saying: 'This bit of real lace is still good, and that silk scarf; but the rest is all brummagem and long out of date.' "For we, to-day, O Oom and Tante, with our new-found mechanical inventions, and our accumulations of material goods, are like little children who have just been given a rattle, and who spring it, till it deafens themselves and every one else besides, and can hear nothing else. We are like little long-tailed monkeys, who having found a bag of sugar think that there is now nothing left in life but to sit round it and eat it till they die. "We are like to the children of Israel, when they built themselves the golden calf and then danced about it, saying: 'Thou art the Lord our God, and there is none like unto thee! From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God, and thy years shall have no end!'--till a Moses, it may be, shall come, and smite it into powder: and of that powder, mingled with the waters of life, shall all the nations that worshipped drink, and they shall call it Marah. And then it may be that they will seek for a new God. "We say it, well knowing the soft burst of laughter which will arise now to-day, when the door is not yet closed on the nineteenth century, and its ideals are yet dominating the men and women of the age--that the time may come when even men of the world, those who live in the present, who labour not for the future nor learn from the past, will recognize that man is a complex creature, and that material wealth satisfies only a moiety of his nature, and that material goods possessed in excess by one portion of the community and lacking wholly to the other, mean a condition of disease--that the time will come when men will profess it in order to be called sane; that the railway-train which brings the prostitute, the stock exchange, and the foes to the freedom of a people, into the heart of its land, had better for humanity have been the slowest ox-wagon crawling across the plains; and had it taken two million years to come, so much better for the nation and the world; that the value of a species of conveyance whether for men or goods depends entirely to mankind on the nature of what it brings; that even that Ark of the Covenant of the nineteenth century--a new railway run by a joint stock company--is worthy of adoration, or is not, entirely by the increased strength of body, width of sympathy, clearness of intellect and joy in life it tends to confer on the folks among whom it runs; that a submarine cable used to whisper lies from land to land, and stir up the hearts of people against people, and to