in
favour of a texture of frank inquiries and arranged considerations. Our
utmost aim is a rough sketch of the coming time, a prospectus, as it
were, of the joint undertaking of mankind in facing these impending
years. The reader is a prospective shareholder--he and his heirs--though
whether he will find this anticipatory balance-sheet to his belief or
liking is another matter.

For reasons that will develop themselves more clearly as these papers
unfold, it is extremely convenient to begin with a speculation upon the
probable developments and changes of the means of land locomotion
during the coming decades. No one who has studied the civil history of
the nineteenth century will deny how far-reaching the consequences of
changes in transit may be, and no one who has studied the military
performances of General Buller and General De Wet but will see that upon
transport, upon locomotion, may also hang the most momentous issues of
politics and war. The growth of our great cities, the rapid populating
of America, the entry of China into the field of European politics are,
for example, quite obviously and directly consequences of new methods of
locomotion. And while so much hangs upon the development of these
methods, that development is, on the other hand, a process comparatively
independent, now at any rate, of most of the other great movements
affected by it. It depends upon a sequence of ideas arising, and of
experiments made, and upon laws of political economy, almost as
inevitable as natural laws. Such great issues, supposing them to be
possible, as the return of Western Europe to the Roman communion, the
overthrow of the British Empire by Germany, or the inundation of Europe
by the "Yellow Peril," might conceivably affect such details, let us
say, as door-handles and ventilators or mileage of line, but would
probably leave the essential features of the evolution of locomotion
untouched. The evolution of locomotion has a purely historical relation
to the Western European peoples. It is no longer dependent upon them,
or exclusively in their hands. The Malay nowadays sets out upon his
pilgrimage to Mecca in an excursion steamship of iron, and the
immemorial Hindoo goes a-shopping in a train, and in Japan and
Australasia and America, there are plentiful hands and minds to take up
the process now, even should the European let it fall.

The beginning of this twentieth century happens to coincide with a very
interesting ph