_

I have been reading over the pages of this diary for the year just
coming to a close. This has led me to some retrospection, looking yet
farther back, and comparing the present with the last century. The 19th
century was proud of itself; and we of the 20th have hardly gained all
that we should in true humility. Both centuries have had their great
events and great advances; and both, their weaknesses, errors, and
absurdities. I will venture a comparison of some of these.

The _most absurd_ things of the 19th century, I think, were these: the
decree at Rome of the infallibility of the Pope; England's bolstering up
the Turkish Empire for fear of Russia attacking India; Lord
Beaconsfield's administration altogether; the financial policy of the
American green-back party; the belief in spirit-rapping, in the first
principles of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, and in the sufficiency of
Darwin's theory of natural selection to account for the ascent from
lower to higher species; the shot-gun quarantine in the South against
yellow fever; the toleration of the waltz, in _otherwise civilized_
society, when even Lord Byron denounced it; and the unreformed spelling
of the English language.

As the greatest national _crimes_ of the last century, I would name the
British government forcing by war the trade in Opium upon China, and the
long-continued bad faith of the United States government towards the
Indian tribes of the West.

Perhaps the greatest _wonders_ of the 19th century were the invention of
photography, solar spectral analysis, the radiometer, the phonograph,
the photophone; in public affairs, the reunion of the old and new school
Presbyterian Churches, and the disappearance, by civil war, of negro
slavery in the United States.

The greatest _triumphs_ of the first part of the 20th century have been
the abandonment of all tariffs for protection in the United States, as
well as in Europe, establishing perfectly free trade throughout the
world; the successful introduction of woman's suffrage in almost every
State of our Union; the acceptance of the principle of arbitration,
through international congresses, in all governmental disputes, by the
great powers of both hemispheres; the practical conquest of intemperance,
by the abolition of drinking-houses everywhere; and the disappearance
of sectarianism amongst Christian denominations,--excepting only the
persistently exclusive claims of the three great historical churche