A nation may now become educated; a people may now be safe
against poverty or famine; the world is even now probably past
the critical point and sure of unintermitted future progress.
We may be allowed to hope that later generations may continue
to see an interminable succession of advances, made by coming
men of science and by learned engineers and mechanics that shall
continually add to the sum of human happiness in this world, and
make it continually easier to prepare for a better world and a
brighter. Who knows but that the telescope, the spectroscope,
and other as yet uninvented instruments may aid us in this by
revealing the secrets of other and more perfect lives in other
and more advanced worlds than ours, despite the head-shaking
of those who know most of the probabilities? Who can say that
the life of the race may not be made in a few generations, by
this ever-accelerating progress of which the century has seen
but the beginning, a true millennial introduction into the
unseen universe and the glorious life that every man, Christian
or skeptic, optimist, or pessimist, would gladly hope for and
believe possible? (Text.)--R. H. THURSTON, _North
American Review_.
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