A Hundred Years Hence
CHAPTER I
THE RATE OF PROGRESS
To anyone who has considered at all attentively the enormous material advances of the nineteenth century, a much more remarkable thing than any invention or improvement which that century brought forth must be the speed of human progression during the hundred years between 1800 and 1900, and the extraordinary acceleration of that speed which began to establish itself about the year 1880. But indeed, during the whole century, our forward movement was steadily gaining impetus. The difference between the state of the world in 1700 and its state in 1800 is insignificant compared with the differences established between the latter date and the opening of the twentieth century. But it is hardly less insignificant than the progress of the decade 1800–1810 compared with that of the decade 1890–1900. We are, in fact, picking up speed at an enormous rate. The beginning of the twenty-first century will exhibit differences, when compared with our own day, which even the boldest imagination can hardly need to be restrained in conjecturing. The latter part of the nineteenth century was the age of electricity, just as the middle part was the age of steam. The first part of the twentieth century is evidently going to be the age of wave manipulation, of which wireless telegraphy, as we know it, is but the first infantile stirring.
What the developments promised (and they are already quite easily presageable) by wireless telegraphy will give us, and what they will be superseded by, can only be very dimly imagined; what their effects will be upon the human race in itself no one has yet ventured even to hint at. Few things are more remarkable in the numerous and highly-varied experiments of vaticinatory fiction and more serious efforts of prognostication than the utter absence of any adequate attempt to forecast the future of the race itself. Social and political changes, the enormous differences which are certain to be effected in the manner of human life, have been from time to time more or less boldly imagined, and a couple of volumes of very able forecasts of the future have recently been published by a writer of singular vision and highly-trained scientific imagination. But it does not hitherto appear to have been at all fully perceived that the moral constitution of man himself is quite certain to be profoundly modified, not alone by the influence of a material environment which will have been changed as the environment of man has never been changed since the first inhabitation of this planet, but also by the steady development of inward changes which have already begun to manifest themselves. Since the year 1800 ideas which, so far as we have any means of knowing, had been regarded as irrefragable ever since man first began to think and to set his thoughts upon record, have been utterly shattered. One has only to compare the opinions of even average thinkers of our own day on such subjects as marriage, the status of woman, and the education of children, with the opinions, practically current without material change since the dawn of history, in 1800, to perceive the truth of this statement; and the change of attitude on the part of civilised people, outside the Roman Catholic Church (and, to some extent, even within it), towards religion is not less remarkable. An enlightened man of the present day is so radically different in all his ideas from a similar individual of the early nineteenth century, that it is hardly possible for a modern student to write with any intelligence on the deeper significance of events and life prior to 1800. Grotesquely inadequate as most historical novels of our own day are, they are perhaps hardly less inadequate than our own understanding of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott could probably write of crusaders and the age of chivalry without committing serious blunders of sentiment. What the world thought in the age of Saladin the world practically thought in the age of Napoleon. But the irresistible infection of modern ideas has made it hardly possible for us to enter with any fulness into the sentiments of Scott; and the sentiments put into the mouth, and the thoughts into the mind, of the hero of any historical novel of our own day would be utterly incomprehensible to that hero, could he by some miracle be resuscitated, and could we translate them literally to him. We unconsciously endow the personages of our historical fiction with ideas for which they had not even the names.
And the development of the human mind proceeds apace. It will be even more difficult for the ordinary cultured man of a hundred years hence to form any full conception of our ideas than it is for us to appraise the mental attitude of the men of the eighteenth century. To take a single example: the humanest warrior of the Napoleonic wars appears a monster of cruelty if compared with the sternest of modern generals. Napoleon devastated provinces without a word of censure from competent critics of the art of war. A howl of execration went up, not from continental Europe alone, at the measures—seriously embarrassing to our military operations, and enormously helpful to our enemy—which the British generals took in order to diminish the sufferings of the non-combatant population of the Transvaal; camps of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel in comfort the hospitals of our own wounded! And there is a section of the Press in this country which still occasionally remembers, to complain of it, the fact that our generals found it necessary, for military reasons, to burn farm-houses. I should not like to attempt the conjecture, what Wellington would have said in answer to such a complaint, or what he would have done to a self-appointed emissary who visited his camps for the purpose of criticising his action! It would have been no more impossible for him to foresee the day of such things, however, than it is for us to predict the moral sense of the year 2000. The fact is that we have greatly deteriorated in war, although, or rather because, we have even more greatly improved in morals and feeling. William Morris conceived of man in the coming time as a sort of recreated mediæval. Mr Wells conceives him as practically a nineteenth-century man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new material conditions. Bellamy described him in terms of a being inconceivable by any sort of reason. No one appears to have seen that his moral nature will have been not merely revolutionised, but recreated, just as our own morality has been recreated during the last hundred years, not so much by the influence of material environment or the march of invention, as by the regeneration of human conscience.
In no way will the acceleration of the speed of progress be more apparent than in the thoughts and emotions of men. But to say this is not to belittle the progress which science and invention have in store for the new age. In applying a sort of imaginative telescope to the mental eye it will be necessary to keep constantly in view the utter inconceivableness of modern achievement by the civilised world of the past. When electricity was no more than a sort of scientific plaything—when notions of its possible uses were (as in Davy’s time) far less substantially imagined than, for instance, the possible uses of radium are to-day, even scientific thinkers, endowed with what Huxley so luminously applauded as scientific imagination, had no rudiment of the materials for conceiving such inventions as the electric telegraph—far less the possibilities of transmitted and picked-up wave energy. And here, at the beginning of wireless telegraphy, we are no less in the dark as to what will develop from it and what will supersede it. The nineteenth century progressed, almost from first to last, on the strength of the discovery of how to utilise the stored energy of coal, whether directly in the steam engine or indirectly in the dynamo-electric machine and the electric motor. With the end of the coal age already well in view, we can only conjecture what the sources of mechanical power will be a hundred years hence. Before we have quite exhausted our coal measures and begun to draw more liberally on our stores of petroleum, we shall no doubt have abandoned altogether so wasteful a contrivance as the steam engine. There is a clumsiness almost barbarous in the roundabout employment of coal to produce heat, the steam engine to utilise only a miserable fraction of the potential energy even of the part of the coal which we do not fatuously allow to escape as smoke; of the dynamo to use up a part of the motion yielded by the steam engine in producing electricity (while a small but recognisable portion of that motion is converted wastefully back again into heat), and of the electro-motor to re-convert the electricity into motion, heat, light and chemical energy, according to our requirements. It cannot be many years before we learn to use coal far more economically than we do nowadays, abolishing the furnace and the steam engine, and obtaining electricity directly from coal itself by some sort of electro-chemical decomposition. But even so, our coal will not last much longer. The speed of our progress will exhaust it much sooner than most people imagine, and probably in another twenty-five years the end of our petroleum will also begin to be looked forward to with apprehension.