gas in existence. There will be no breakdown, no explosion of or gasoline, and the trip will be made at an even twenty-five miles an hour. The Providence Journal said: "The day is coming when practically every household will have a telephone, just as it has other modern facilities. This may seem a broad statement, but no one can read the figures of the last few years without seeing how general the use of the instrument is getting to be." A prophecy that included two rather extraordinary details came from an odd figure of the time, John Jacob Astor, one of the three or four richest men in America, who combined with his custody of the largest amount of New York City real estate under one ownership, a really earnest, if occasionally naïve, preoccupation with some forms of art and science. Mr. Astor wrote that "as zoology shows us the amphibian metamorphosed into the land vertebrate, followed by the bird, so history reveals the aborigine's dugout, the Fifth Avenue omnibus, and the ox-cart, followed by the automobile, which is preparing the light and powerful engine that will soon propel the flying-machine. This will be a happy dawn for earth-dwellers, for war will become so destructive that it will probably bring its own end; and the human caterpillar, already mechanically converted into the grasshopper, will become a fairly beautiful butterfly. Street pavements will, of course, be smooth and easily cleaned - asphalt, bituminous macadam, or sheet steel; and keeping horses in large cities will doubtless be prohibited by the Board of Health, as stabling cows, pigs, or sheep is now. Second-story sidewalks, composed largely of translucent glass, leaving all the present street level to vehicles, are already badly needed, . . . and will doubtless have made their appearance in less than twenty years.' 1 New York World, May 10, 1903. " 1 There was widely read in America, and rather more sympathetically in America than in his own country, the really remarkable "Anticipations" of Mr. H. G. Wells. He exhorted his countrymen to "strip from their eyes the most blinding of all influences, acquiescence in the familiar." He was zealously interested in the "numerous experimental motors to-day." About these new vehicles the least pretentious of his predictions was that their exasperating trail of stench will soon be fined away." He asked his sceptical readers to take his word for it that there would soon be "a light, powerful engine, smooth-running, not obnoxious to sensitive nostrils, and altogether suitable for high-road traffic. . . . It will be capable of a day's journey of 300 miles or more." As for the airplane, Mr. Wells believed it would come, but said: "I do not think it at all probable that aeronautics will ever come into play as a serious modification of transport and communication.' Even Mr. Wells, however, balked at the submarine: "I must confess that my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea.' Aside from mechanics, within the field of social organization and control, one of the most striking of Mr. Wells's anticipations included an attitude toward persons afflicted with a craving for strong drink, markedly different from the attitude of those residents of the United States, who after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1918, felt that deprivation of access to the means for intoxication was the denial of a fundamental human right. Mr. Wells foresaw a New Republic, whose people will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the population - the small minority, for example, afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such hideous incurable habits of mind as the craving for PROPHECIES OF PEACE 371 intoxication exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused. And I imagine also the plea and proof that a grave criminal is also insane will be regarded by them, not as a reason for mercy, but as an added reason for death. Doctor Albert Shaw predicted in The Review of Reviews that "the twentieth century in future ages will be famous for the expanded and altered nature of international relations. It is not improbable that, when the events of the twentieth century fall into their true places in the perspectives of history, the work of the Hague Peace Conference will appear as the crowning achievement of the period and its best legacy to its successor." Andrew Carnegie was even more definite. He was hopeful "that ere the twentieth century closes, the earth will be purged of its foulest shame, the killing by men in battle under the name of war." 1 There were not wanting the prophets of pessimism. The year 1900 was about the beginning of the importation of various literary missionaries from Russia, one of whom said: One fears for the future of mankind. The most ominous sign is not the fact that the cook, servant-girl, and lackey want the same pleasures which not long ago were the monopoly of the rich alone; but the fact that all, all without exception, rich and idle as well as poor and industrious, seek and demand daily amusements, gaiety, excitement, and keen impressions-demand it all as something without which life is impossible, which may not be denied them.2 The New York World gathered together a kind of symposuistic town meeting of the prophets of evil by inviting them to say what they believed to be the greatest menace of the new century. William Jennings Bryan 1 Literary Digest, January 12, 1901. 2 Eugene Markov, in the Novoye Vremya. said: "The increasing influence of wealth will lead to increasing disregard of the inalienable rights of man. President Schurman, of Cornell, feared most the "exaltation, worship, and pursuit of money as the foremost good of life." Samuel Gompers was concerned about Oriental competition against American labor. Dean Farrar declared "the chief social danger is the dominance of drink." President Hadley, of Yale, thought it was "legislation based on the self-interest of individuals, or classes, instead of on public sentiment and public spirit." Ellen Terry, the growing artificiality in our social life. The Bishop of Gloucester, "self-advertising vanity." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said "an ill-balanced, excitable, and sensation-mongering press." Max Beerbohm expressed the same apprehension in two words, "jumpy journals.” One man, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when asked what was the chief danger threatening the coming century, replied: "I have not the slightest idea." SOME CONTRASTS AND CHANGES, 1900 TO 1925 Some Changes That Were Fundamental and Some Others Of all changes, the most momentous to a country are, obviously, any that take place in the physical composition of the people, in their strains of blood and race. There were such changes in America: first, in a direction different from the past; and then, toward the end of the period, back to the old direction. The changes were slight, in proportion to the population as a whole; but at the time they were arrested they had a rapid momen tum. Always up to 1900 the largest strain by far in the racial composition of the American people had been that from northern and western Europe: from Great Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries. But in 1900, and for about twenty years preceding, the additions to the American stock from this strain, by immigration, were falling off. At the same time immigrants from the south and east of Europe, from Latin and Slavic countries, and from Hebrew centres, had begun to come in rapidly increasing numbers. |