A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
The Expectations of an Optimist
By
T. BARON RUSSELL
Author of
"A Guardian of the Poor," "The Mandate," etc.
LONDON
T. Fisher Unwin
Paternoster Square
1905
There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life; which in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV., III. i.
They pass through whirl-pools, and deep woes do shun,
Who the event weigh, 'ere the action's done.
Webster, Duchess of Malfi, II. 4.
PREFACE
The following was at first intended to be no more than an attempt to
foresee the probable trend of mechanical invention and scientific
discovery during the present century. But as the work took shape
it was seen to involve a certain amount of what may be called
moral conjecture, since the material progress of the new age could
not very well be imagined without taking into account its mental
characteristics. In these expectations of an optimist, a great
ethical improvement of the civilised human race has been anticipated,
and a rate of progress foreseen which perhaps no previous writers
have looked for. Both in regard to moral development and material
progress, it has been the aim of the author to predict nothing that
the tendencies of existing movement do not justify us in expecting.
An attempt of this kind is exposed to facile criticism. It will be easy
for objectors to signalise this or that expected invention as beyond
scientific possibility, that or the other moral reform as fit only for
Utopia. But those who will consent to perpend the enormous and utterly
unforeseen advance of the nineteenth century will recognise the danger
of limiting their anticipations concerning the possibilities of the
twenty-first. A fanciful description in (I think) Addison's Spectator
of an invention by which the movements of an indicator on a lettered
dial were imagined to be reproduced on a similar dial at a distance,
and employed as a means of communication, must have seemed wholly
chimerical to its readers; and even as recently as fifty years ago,
anyone who predicted the telephone would have been laughed at. When
the principle of the accumulator was already discovered a very
competent practical electrician told the writer that he need not
worry himself much about the idea: there was not the least likelihood
that electricity could ever be "bottled up in cisterns"! On the whole
there is more likelihood of error in timidity than in boldness when
we attempt to foresee what will be attained after the increasingly
rapid movement of scientific progress during this twentieth century
shall have gathered full force.
For the rest, criticism of this sort is disarmed, because the reader
has been in any case invited to enter a realm of more or less pure
imagination. No one can exactly know with what births, monstrous or
beautiful, the future may teem. Admitting a certain point of view--that
of almost unrestrained optimism--the predictions here offered will,
it is believed, be found to be along the line of existing progress.
Beaufort House,
Brentford.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Rate of Progress 1
II. Housing, Travel and Population. Questions 13
III. The Man of Business 38
IV. The Cult of Pleasure 54
V. The Newspaper of the Future and the Future of
the Newspaper 68
VI. Utilising the Sea 95
VII. The March of Science 106
VIII. Education a Hundred Years Hence 134
IX. Religion: the Fine Arts, Literature 175
X. The Age of Economies 205
XI. The Law a Hundred Years Hence 233
XII. Conclusions 286
INDEX 309
A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE
CHAPTER I
THE RATE OF PROGRESS
To anyone who has considered at all attentively the enormous material
advances of the nineteenth century, a much more remarkable thing than
any invention or improvement which that century brought forth must
be the speed of human progression during the hundred years between
1800 and 1900, and the extraordinary acceleration of that speed
which began to establish itself about the year 1880. But indeed,
during the whole century, our forward movement was steadily gaining
impetus. The difference between the state of the world in 1700 and
its state in 1800 is insignificant compared with the differences
established between the latter date and the opening of the twentieth
century. But it is hardly less insignificant than the progress of the
decade 1800-1810 compared with that of the decade 1890-1900. We are,
in fact, picking up speed at an enormous rate. The beginning of the
twenty-first century will exhibit differences, when compared with
our own day, which even the boldest imagination can hardly need to be
restrained in conjecturing. The latter part of the nineteenth century
was the age of electricity, just as the middle part was the age of
steam. The first part of the twentieth century is evidently going
to be the age of wave manipulation, of which wireless telegraphy,
as we know it, is but the first infantile stirring.
What the developments promised (and they are already quite easily
presageable) by wireless telegraphy will give us, and what they
will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined; what their
effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured
even to hint at. Few things are more remarkable in the numerous
and highly-varied experiments of vaticinatory fiction and more
serious efforts of prognostication than the utter absence of any
adequate attempt to forecast the future of the race itself. Social
and political changes, the enormous differences which are certain
to be effected in the manner of human life, have been from time to
time more or less boldly imagined, and a couple of volumes of very
able forecasts of the future have recently been published by a writer
of singular vision and highly-trained scientific imagination. But it
does not hitherto appear to have been at all fully perceived that the
moral constitution of man himself is quite certain to be profoundly
modified, not alone by the influence of a material environment
which will have been changed as the environment of man has never
been changed since the first inhabitation of this planet, but also
by the steady development of inward changes which have already begun
to manifest themselves. Since the year 1800 ideas which, so far as
we have any means of knowing, had been regarded as irrefragable ever
since man first began to think and to set his thoughts upon record,
have been utterly shattered. One has only to compare the opinions of
even average thinkers of our own day on such subjects as marriage,
the status of woman, and the education of children, with the opinions,
practically current without material change since the dawn of history,
in 1800, to perceive the truth of this statement; and the change of
attitude on the part of civilised people, outside the Roman Catholic
Church (and, to some extent, even within it), towards religion is not
less remarkable. An enlightened man of the present day is so radically
different in all his ideas from a similar individual of the early
nineteenth century, that it is hardly possible for a modern student
to write with any intelligence on the deeper significance of events
and life prior to 1800. Grotesquely inadequate as most historical
novels of our own day are, they are perhaps hardly less inadequate
than our own understanding of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott
could probably write of crusaders and the age of chivalry without
committing serious blunders of sentiment. What the world thought
in the age of Saladin the world practically thought in the age of
Napoleon. But the irresistible infection of modern ideas has made it
hardly possible for us to enter with any fulness into the sentiments
of Scott; and the sentiments put into the mouth, and the thoughts
into the mind, of the hero of any historical novel of our own day
would be utterly incomprehensible to that hero, could he by some
miracle be resuscitated, and could we translate them literally to
him. We unconsciously endow the personages of our historical fiction
with ideas for which they had not even the names.
And the development of the human mind proceeds apace. It will be
even more difficult for the ordinary cultured man of a hundred years
hence to form any full conception of our ideas than it is for us to
appraise the mental attitude of the men of the eighteenth century. To
take a single example: the humanest warrior of the Napoleonic wars
appears a monster of cruelty if compared with the sternest of modern
generals. Napoleon devastated provinces without a word of censure
from competent critics of the art of war. A howl of execration went
up, not from continental Europe alone, at the measures--seriously
embarrassing to our military operations, and enormously helpful to
our enemy--which the British generals took in order to diminish the
sufferings of the non-combatant population of the Transvaal; camps
of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel in comfort the
hospitals of our own wounded! And there is a section of the Press in
this country which still occasionally remembers, to complain of it,
the fact that our generals found it necessary, for military reasons,
to burn farm-houses. I should not like to attempt the conjecture,
what Wellington would have said in answer to such a complaint, or
what he would have done to a self-appointed emissary who visited
his camps for the purpose of criticising his action! It would have
been no more impossible for him to foresee the day of such things,
however, than it is for us to predict the moral sense of the year
2000. The fact is that we have greatly deteriorated in war, although,
or rather because, we have even more greatly improved in morals and
feeling. William Morris conceived of man in the coming time as a
sort of recreated mediæval. Mr Wells conceives him as practically a
nineteenth-century man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new material
conditions. Bellamy described him in terms of a being inconceivable
by any sort of reason. No one appears to have seen that his moral
nature will have been not merely revolutionised, but recreated, just
as our own morality has been recreated during the last hundred years,
not so much by the influence of material environment or the march of
invention, as by the regeneration of human conscience.
In no way will the acceleration of the speed of progress be more
apparent than in the thoughts and emotions of men. But to say this
is not to belittle the progress which science and invention have in
store for the new age. In applying a sort of imaginative telescope
to the mental eye it will be necessary to keep constantly in view
the utter inconceivableness of modern achievement by the civilised
world of the past. When electricity was no more than a sort of
scientific plaything--when notions of its possible uses were (as in
Davy's time) far less substantially imagined than, for instance, the
possible uses of radium are to-day, even scientific thinkers, endowed
with what Huxley so luminously applauded as scientific imagination,
had no rudiment of the materials for conceiving such inventions as
the electric telegraph--far less the possibilities of transmitted
and picked-up wave energy. And here, at the beginning of wireless
telegraphy, we are no less in the dark as to what will develop from
it and what will supersede it. The nineteenth century progressed,
almost from first to last, on the strength of the discovery of how
to utilise the stored energy of coal, whether directly in the steam
engine or indirectly in the dynamo-electric machine and the electric
motor. With the end of the coal age already well in view, we can only
conjecture what the sources of mechanical power will be a hundred
years hence. Before we have quite exhausted our coal measures and
begun to draw more liberally on our stores of petroleum, we shall
no doubt have abandoned altogether so wasteful a contrivance as the
steam engine. There is a clumsiness almost barbarous in the roundabout
employment of coal to produce heat, the steam engine to utilise only
a miserable fraction of the potential energy even of the part of
the coal which we do not fatuously allow to escape as smoke; of the
dynamo to use up a part of the motion yielded by the steam engine
in producing electricity (while a small but recognisable portion of
that motion is converted wastefully back again into heat), and of the
electro-motor to re-convert the electricity into motion, heat, light
and chemical energy, according to our requirements. It cannot be many
years before we learn to use coal far more economically than we do
nowadays, abolishing the furnace and the steam engine, and obtaining
electricity directly from coal itself by some sort of electro-chemical
decomposition. But even so, our coal will not last much longer. The
speed of our progress will exhaust it much sooner than most people
imagine, and probably in another twenty-five years the end of our
petroleum will also begin to be looked forward to with apprehension.
About this period, or perhaps immediately after, progress will have
been accelerated to an enormous degree by the invention of some new
method of decomposing water. The economical analysis of water into its
two component gases, whose chemical affinity and antipodal electrical
attractions are already utilised to some extent in such appliances
as the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and electrical storage batteries, is
a secret capable of extraordinary beneficences to the new age. By
burning hydrogen in oxygen we can already produce the greatest heat
practically needed in the arts; the electric furnace only superseding
this process because it happens to be more manageable. But when we
want oxygen and hydrogen, we do not, in practice, now obtain them from
water: we only combine them as water in the act of utilisation. The
rational line of progress is obviously to seek means of directly
decomposing water. When we can do this compendiously and economically
we shall have an inexhaustible supply of energy--for water thus
used is not destroyed as water, as coal is destroyed, quâ coal,
when we utilise its stored energy. The very act of utilising the
gases recombines them: and we can use them thus for the production
of almost every kind of energy that man at present needs. We can use
them for heat by burning them together. We can use them for light by
burning them in the presence of any substance capable of being made
incandescent. We shall be able to use them to generate electricity
by some sort of contrivance akin to the accumulator of the present
day (a highly rudimentary invention); and it would be even now a
very simple matter to utilise their explosive recombination for the
direct production of power as motion. Utilised apart, the constituent
gases of water have many other uses and possible uses. Hydrogen,
under suitable treatment, yields the greatest obtainable cold,
as oxygen and hydrogen together yield the greatest heat. If our
flying-machines need a sort of ballast to reinforce their mechanical
lifting apparatus, hydrogen is the best possible assistant. And the
probable uses of oxygen are yet more numerous. So long as we still
burn anything at all except a mixture of oxygen and hydrogen--and
ultimately we shall have nothing else left to burn--oxygen is capable
of multiplying the efficiency of all combustion. One of the greatest
problems of our own day is the disposal of waste products of all
sorts--the sources of inconvenience, disease and dirt. Oxygen,
if readily and copiously obtainable, is capable of destroying them
all. Indeed, it seems likely that medicine, the least progressive of
the sciences to-day, will find in oxygen the great propulsive force of
its forward movement. In considerably less than a hundred years hence
such makeshifts as drugging, and the fighting of one disease by the
instalment in the organism of another, will certainly have gone by
the board. Antisepsis and Asepsis (the latter almost infinitely the
greatest invention in the history of therapeutics) will have pushed
their way from surgery into medicine. There are numerous diseases
which can be not merely cured, but ultimately abolished when we have
once discovered how to use oxygen adequately. The readjustment of
the conditions of life determined by the removal from the civilised
world of the greater number of diseases, and perhaps of all diseases
except those arising out of wilful misconduct (as improper diet) and
even by the elimination of most of the evils of hurry and overwork
(for what are medically and chemically known as fatigue products can
almost certainly be eliminated from the system by the proper use,
yet to be discovered, of oxygen) must inevitably have an enormous
influence not merely upon the physical life of man, but also, and
even more, upon his mental constitution. The rate of progress will
thus in yet another way be vastly accelerated.
Most likely the universal source of power, then, before the middle
of the century, will be the recomposition of water--in other words,
we shall get all the power we want by splitting up water into oxygen
and hydrogen, and then allowing those gases to recombine, thereby
returning to us the energy we have employed in the analysis. How
we shall employ this power is largely for the future to decide, and
certainly in the earlier future we shall employ it in the generation
of etheric waves of various kinds. The world of science is visibly
on the threshold of new and revolutionary discoveries on the nature
and composition of matter, and whither these discoveries will lead us
it is not usefully possible to conjecture. But certainly, after the
usual incubation period of a scientific discovery--when it is merely
a sort of wonderful toy, as argon and radium are at present--there
will come the practical men, suckled at the large and noble breasts of
disinterested, unremunerative truth, and ready to turn that nutriment
into world-moving material usefulness: so, again, the rate of progress
will receive a vast and valuable acceleration. Electricity, whose gift
to the world has been so great, will probably not, until after several
decades, approach the limits of its realm, and so long as electricity
remains a considerable element in the utilisation of those stores
of dissipating energy by which the planet lives, it is possible to
foresee something of what will become of man during the next age.
We have here the limits of such an inquiry as the present. Placing
the end of the age of electricity at provisionally about a hundred
years hence (but it is quite conceivable that the rate of progress may
overtake it earlier and shut the door on conjecture) it is possible to
forecast, not indeed with certainty, but with a measure of imaginative
probability, what will happen as the resources of electricity are
developed and the other material amenities of the world are worked
along the line of natural progress. So far as the light of analogy
can point the way the reader is invited on a sort of conjectural
journey. Of the developments of the moral ideas of man likely to
be determined, not so much by the coming change in his material
environment, as by the evolution of inner forces already at work,
I propose to say something at the end of the book. In the meantime,
the probable material changes in the next hundred years (or less,
according to the rate of our progress) in various departments of life
will be the subject of some intermediate conjectures.