e a common ground for understanding the
real pride of life, the real reason for the incidental nastiness of
vice, and so they will be a sanely reproductive class, and, above all,
an educating class. Just how much they will have kept or changed of the
deliquescent morality of to-day, when in a hundred years or so they do
distinctively and powerfully emerge, I cannot speculate now. They will
certainly be a moral people. They will have developed the literature of
their needs, they will have discussed and tested and thrashed out many
things, they will be clear where we are confused, resolved where we are
undecided and weak. In the districts of industrial possibility, in the
healthier quarters of the town regions, away from the swamps and away
from the glare of the midnight lights, these people will be gathered
together. They will be linked in professions through the agency of great
and sober papers--in England the _Lancet_, the _British Medical
Journal_, and the already great periodicals of the engineering trades,
foreshadow something, but only a very little, of what these papers may
be. The best of the wealthy will gravitate to their attracting
centres.... Unless some great catastrophe in nature break down all that
man has built, these great kindred groups of capable men and educated,
adequate women must be, under the operation of the forces we have
considered so far, the element finally emergent amidst the vast
confusions of the coming time.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] That interesting book by Mr. George Sutherland, _Twentieth Century
Inventions_, is very suggestive on these as on many other matters.

[31] I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used by
mineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter upon
centres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must have
occurred in the growth of flints.

[32] Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary "Boom," for
example, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth
century. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron or
puzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful use
of the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced him
even into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the
factory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" touches whole sections of
the reading public no more than fog-horns going down Channel. One would
as soon think of Skinner's Soap for one's librar