Our Achievements and Prospects (Part 2)

The nineteenth century has closed with civilization more advanced in the arts and in letters than in the best days of Greece or Rome or the Renaissance; with the development in mechanical arts, in chemistry and in its appliances, in agriculture and in manufactures, beyond the experience of all preceding centuries put together. The political, social, and productive revolutions and evolutions of the period mark it as unique, beneficent, and glorious in the story of the ages. It has been the era of emancipation from bigotry and prejudice, from class distinctions and from inequalities in law, from shackles upon the limbs and padlocks upon the lips of mankind. It has been conspicuously the century of civilization, humanity, and liberty. As its presiding and inspiring genius looks proudly over the results, he may well say to the angel of the twentieth century, "You can admire, you can follow, but whither can you lead?"

The imaginary line drawn on the thirty-first day of December, 1900, between the past and the future cannot stop the wheels of progress nor curb the steeds, instinct with the life of steam and electricity, which are to leap over this boundary in their resistless course. The twentieth century will be pre-eminently the period for the equitable adjustment of the mighty forces called into existence by the spirit of the nineteenth century, and which have so deranged the relations of capital and labor, of trades and occupations, of markets and commercial highways. There will come about a oneness of races and nationalities by which the moral sense of civilization will overcome the timidity of diplomacy to prevent or to punish the repetition of such atrocities as have been perpetrated in Armenia. The Turk will either adopt the laws and recognize the rights of life, liberty, and property commonly recognized among Christian nations, or his empire will be dismembered and distributed among the great powers of Europe. Militarism, which is crushing the life out of the great nations of the Continent, will break down because of the burdens it imposes and the conditions it exacts. The peoples of those countries, groaning under this ever-increasing and eventually intolerable load, will revolt. They will teach their rulers that that peace is not worth the price which can only be maintained by armaments which are increased on the one side as rapidly as on the other, so that peace depends upon an equilibrium of trained soldiers and modern implements of war. They will discover closer ties of international friendship, which will strengthen year by year, and in the camaraderie of international commerce they will come to maintain amicable relations with one another before tribunals of arbitration and under the principles of justice. The world will discover, as we found in our own country in our Civil War, and again in 1898, that a free people quickly respond to the call of patriotism to meet every requirement of war in defence of their nation, and that armies of citizen soldiers, when the danger is past, resume at once their places in the industries of the land. The twentieth century will realize the prophecy, "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks."

The pessimist has proved with startling accuracy that with the exhaustion of fuel supplies in the forests and in the coal mines, the earth can no longer support its teeming populations, and that we are rushing headlong into anarchy and chaos. The twentieth century will find in the methods of the production of electrical power an economy of fuel and an increase of force which will accelerate progress and conserve our storage of supplies. Transportation both by land and by sea will be done solely by electricity. The same power will run the mills, the furnaces, and the factories. It will revolutionize and economize the processes of domestic life. It will shift and alter centres of production to places where electrical power can be more cheaply evolved, and that power will be utilized at long distances from its sources.

The hospitals of the world reached their highest and best conditions in the nineteenth century for the care and cure of the sick and the injured. The hospitals of the twentieth century will perform this work as well, if not better, but they will also be schools of investigation and experiment. It is the peculiarity of each generation that it accepts as a matter of course that which was the astonishment and wonder of its predecessor. The antiseptic principle, which has made possible modern surgery - the discovery of a surgeon still living,- is the commonplace of our day. So are the wonderful revelations which came through the trained brains and skilled hands of Pasteur and of Koch. Systematic and scientific research under liberal and favorable conditions will make the hospitals of the twentieth century the very sources of life. As the Gatling gun and the mitrailleuse enable the explorer in central Africa to disperse hordes of savages and open up unlimited territories for settlement and civilization, so will the leaders of the hospital laboratory produce the germicides which will destroy the living principles of consumption, of tuberculosis, of cancer, of heart, nerve, brain, and muscular troubles, and of all the now unknown and incalculable enemies which give misery and destroy life.