re savage or
physically weaker, simultaneously with each phase of enlightenment.
These things are perhaps truer of society in Europe, and in some
of the States, than in our young Dominion, where everything was
necessarily in a somewhat inchoate condition. Yet had it not been
for the great men who providentially appeared in our midst--our
history, our manners and customs, our whole career as a nation
would simply have been a repetition of European civilization with
all its defects, failures and vices. Statistics of the period
show that neither in the States nor in Canada, amidst all the
surrounding newness, had there arisen any new social condition
peculiar to this continent which remedied to any extent the evils
rampant in old countries. Lunatic asylums, in ghastly sarcasm on
a self-styled intellectual age, reared their colossal facades and
enclosed their thousands of human wrecks. Huge prisons had to be
built in every large town. Hospitals were frequently crowded with
victims of foul diseases. Great cities abounded with filthy lanes,
alleys, and dwellings like dens of wild beasts. Epidemic diseases
occurred from brutal disregard of sanitary measures. Murder and
suicide were rife. Horrible accidents from preventible causes
occurred daily. Great fires were continually destroying valuable
city property, and ruinous monetary panics happened every few
years. And all this in an age that prided itself on being advanced!
An age that produced the telephone, but crowded up lunatic asylums!
That cabled messages all round the world, but filled its prisons to
the doors! That named the metals in the sun, but could not cleanse
its cities! An age, in fact, that was but one remove from the
unmitigated barbarism of medieval times! How marvellous is the
change wrought by a hundred years! We have not been shocked by
a murder in Canada for more than fifty years, nor has a suicide
been heard of for a very long period. Epidemic diseases belong
to the past. The sewage question, that source of vexation to the
municipalities of old, has been scientifically settled--to the
saving of enormous sums of money, and to the permanent benefit
of the community's health. Malignant scourges, like consumption,
epilepsy, cancer, etc., are never heard of except in less favored
countries. There is but one prison to a province, and that is
sometimes empty. Our cities are all fire-proof, and the night
air is never startled now by the hideous jangling of fire-be