lage row had
been known to visit a town. But now-a-days the villager has his
high-class news-sheet; and he is very much discontented indeed if he
does not see the latest intelligence from America, India, Australia,
China--everywhere. An American statesman's conversation of Monday
afternoon is reported accurately in the London journals on Tuesday
morning; a speech of Mr. Gladstone's delivered at midnight on one day
is summarized in New York and San Francisco the next day; the result
of a race run at Epsom is known in Bombay within forty minutes. We use
no paradox when we say that every man in the civilized world now lives
next door to everybody else; oceans are merely convenient pathways,
howling deserts are merely handy places for planting telegraph poles
and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and
country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its
swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism
whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by
sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady's thimble, two pieces
of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the
Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are over, a gentleman in London
will doubtless be able to sit in his office and hear the actual tones
of some speaker in New York.

So much has the magic half century brought about.

If we think of the scientific knowledge possessed by the most
intelligent men when the Queen ascended the throne, we can hardly
refrain from smiling, for it seems as though we were studying the
mental endowment of a race of children. The science of electricity was
in its infancy; the laws of force were misunderstood; men did not know
what heat really was. They knew next to nothing of the history of the
globe, and they accounted for the existence of varying species of
plants and animals by means of the most infantine hypotheses. A
complete revolution--vital and all-embracing--has altered our modes of
thought, so that the man of 1887 can scarcely bring himself to
conceive the state of mind which contented the man of 1837. We have
dark doubts now, perplexing misgivings, weary uncertainties, painful
consciousness of limited powers; but along with these weaknesses we
have our share of certainties. Are we happier? Nay, not in mind. A
quiet melancholy marks the words of all the men who have thought most
deeply and learned most. The wise no longer cry out or