I trust I am thankful my life has been spared until I have seen that
most brilliant epoch of the world's history--the middle of the 20th
century. It would be useless for any man to disparage the vast
achievements of the past fifty years, and if I venture to call
attention to the fact, now apparently forgotten, that the people of the
19th century succeeded in accomplishing many notable things, it must
not be imagined that I intend thereby to discount in any measure the
marvellous inventions of the present age. Men have always been somewhat
prone to look with a certain condescension upon those who lived fifty
or a hundred years before them. This seems to me the especial weakness
of the present age; a feeling of national self-conceit, which, when it
exists, should at least be kept as much in the background as possible.
It will astonish many to know that such also was a failing of the
people of the 19th century. They imagined themselves living in an age
of progress, and while I am not foolish enough to attempt to prove that
they did anything really worth recording, yet it must be admitted by
any unprejudiced man of research that their inventions were at least
stepping-stones to those of to-day. Although the telephone and
telegraph, and all other electrical appliances, are now to be found
only in our national museums, or in the private collections of those
few men who take any interest in the doings of the last century,
nevertheless, the study of the now obsolete science of electricity led
up to the recent discovery of vibratory ether which does the work of
the world so satisfactorily. The people of the 19th century were not
fools, and although I am well aware that this statement will be
received with scorn where it attracts any attention whatever, yet who
can say that the progress of the next half-century may not be as great
as that of the one now ended, and that the people of the next century
may not look upon us with the same contempt which we feel toward those
who lived fifty years ago?
Being an old man, I am, perhaps, a laggard who dwells in the past
rather than the present; still, it seems to me that such an article as
that which appeared recently in _Blackwood_ from the talented pen
of Prof. Mowberry, of Oxford University, is utterly unjustifiable.
Under the title of "Did the People of London Deserve their Fate?" he
endeavors to show that the simultaneous blotting out of millions of
human beings was a beneficial event, the good results of which we still
enjoy. According to him, Londoners were so dull-witted and stupid, so
incapable of improvement, so sodden in the vice of mere money-
gathering, that nothing but their total extinction would have sufficed,
and that, instead of being an appalling catastrophe, the doom of London
was an unmixed blessing. In spite of the unanimous approval with which
this article has been received by the press, I still maintain that such
writing is uncalled for, and that there is something to be said for the
London of the 19th century.