however, would be to enter the field of prophecy, which is no part of my present purpose.

All that I have wished to point out is that for some thousands of years after man learned to make implements of iron, the industrial world and the human civilization that depends upon it, pursued a relatively static course, like a broad, sluggish current, with no new revolutionary discovery to impel it into new channels; and that then one revolutionary discovery succeeded another with bewildering suddenness, so that we of the early days of the twentieth century are farther removed, in an industrial way, from our forerunners of two hundred years ago, than those children of the eighteenth century were from the earliest civilization that ever developed on our globe. Indeed, this startling contrast would still hold true, were we to consider the newest era as compassing only the period of a single life. There are men living to-day who were born in that epoch when the steam engine was for the first time used to turn the wheels of factories. There are many men who can well remember the first practical application of steam to railway traffic. Hosts of men can remember when the first commercial message was transmitted by electricity along a wire. Even middle-aged men recall the first cable message that linked the old world with the new. And the application of the dynamo to the purposes of the world's work is an affair of but yesterday.

The historian of the future, casting his eye back across the long perspective of history, will find civilized man pursuing an even and unbroken course across the ages from the time of the pyramids of Egypt to about the time of the French Revolution. There will be no dearth of incident to claim his attention in the way of wars and conquests, and changing creeds, and the rise and fall of nations, each pursuing virtually the same course of growth and decay as all the others. But when he comes to the close of the eighteenth century, it will not be the social paroxysm of a nation, or the meteoric career of a Napoleon that will claim his attention so much as the introduction of that new method of utilizing the powers of Nature which found its expression in the mechanism called the steam engine.

If the name of any individual stands out as the great and memorable one of that epoch of transition, at which the static current of previous civilization changed suddenly to a Niagara-current of progress, it will be the name of the great scientific inventor, rather than that of the great military conqueror—the name of James Watt, rather than that of Napoleon.

The military conqueror had his day of surpassing glory and departed, to leave the world only a little worse than he found it. But the mechanical inventor left a heritage that was to add day by day to the wealth and happiness of humanity, supplying millions of artificial hands, and making possible such beneficent improvements as no previous age had dreamed of. Tasks that human hands had performed slowly, laboriously, and inadequately, were now to be performed swiftly, with ease, and well by the artificial hands provided with the aid of the new power. Where carts drawn by horses had toiled slowly across the land, and ships driven by the wind had drifted slowly through the waters, massive trains of cars were to hurtle to the four corners of the earth with inconceivable speed, and floating palaces were to course the waters with almost equal defiance to the limitations of time and space.

And then there came that still weirder conquest of time and space, wrought by the electric current. The moment when man first spoke with man from continent to continent in defiance of the oceans, marked the dawning of that larger day when all mankind shall constitute one brotherhood and all peoples but a single nation. Within a half century the sun of that new day has risen well above the horizon, and far sooner than even the optimist of to-day dare predict with certainty, it seems destined to reach its zenith.

But here again we verge upon the dangerous field of prophecy. Let us turn from it and cast an eye back across the most wonderful of centuries, contrasting the conditions of to-day in each of a half-dozen fields of the world's work, with the conditions that obtained at the close of the eighteenth century. Such a brief survey will show us perhaps more vividly than we could otherwise be shown, how vast has been the progress, how marvelous the development of civilization, in the short decades that have elapsed since the coming of the Age of Steam.

Let us pay heed first to the world of the agriculturist. Could we turn back to the days of our grandparents, we should find farming a very different employment from what it is to-day. For the most part the farmer operated but a few small fields; if he had thirty or forty acres of ploughed land, he found ample employment for his capacities. He ploughed his fields with the aid of either a yoke of oxen or a team of horses; he sowed his grain by hand; he cultivated his corn with a hoe; he reaped his oats and wheat with a cradle—a device but one step removed from a sickle; he threshed his grain with a flail; he ground such portion of it as he needed for his own use with the aid of water power at a neighboring mill; and such portion of it as he sold was transported to market, be it far or near, in wagons that compassed twenty or thirty miles a day at best. As regards live stock, each farmer raised a few cattle, sheep, and hogs, and butchered them to supply his own needs, selling the residue to a local dealer who supplied the non-agricultural portion of the neighborhood. Any live stock intended for a distant market was driven on foot across the country to its destination. Each town and city, therefore, drew almost exclusively for its supply from the immediately surrounding country.

To-day the small farmer has become almost obsolete, and the farms of the eastern states that were the nation's chief source of supply a century ago are largely allowed to lie fallow, it being no longer possible to cultivate them profitably in competition with the rich farm lands of the middle west. In that new home of agriculture, the farm that does not comprise two or three hundred acres is considered small; and large farms are those that number their acres by thousands. The soil is turned by steam ploughs; the grain is sown with mechanical seeders and planters; the corn is cultivated with a horse-drawn machine, having blades that do the work of a dozen men; harvesters drawn by three or four horses sweep over the fields and leave the grain mechanically tied in bundles; the steam thresher places the grain in sacks by hundreds of bushels a day; and this grain is hurried off in steam cars to distant mills and yet more distant markets.

Meantime the raising of live stock has become a special department, with which the farmer who deals in cereals often has no concern. The cattle roam over vast pastures and are herded in the winter for fattening in great droves, and protected from the cold in barns that, when contrasted with the sheds of the old-time farmer, seem almost palatial. When in marketable condition, cattle are no longer slaughtered at the farm, but are transported in cars to one of the few great centres, chief of which are the stock yards of Chicago and of Kansas City. At these centres, slaughter houses and meat-packing houses of stupendous magnitude have been developed, capable of handling millions of animals in a year. From these centres the meat is transported in refrigerator cars to the seaboards, and in refrigerator ships to all parts of the world. Beef that grew on the ranges of the far west may thus be offered for sale in the markets of New England villages, at a price that prohibits local competition.

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