nder the magic of progress, war in its essence
and vitality is really diminishing, even while increasing in _materiel_
and grandeur. Neither time nor space will permit the old and tedious
contests of history to be repeated. Military science has entered upon a
new era, nearer than ever to the period when wars shall cease.

But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present.
Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on
tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and
sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal,
wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection
of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and
wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away like
richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and
progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in
clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted
catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the
living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by
the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a
gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious
accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but
swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the
vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under
its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole
country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and
brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the
latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they
stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and
sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only
equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands
from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,--or, if
modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in
countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day
that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of
artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the
celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every
generation