CHAPTER XXIII.

IN WHICH THE NARRAtive closeS.

Thus ended my journey through your beautiful country-a journey which to me. was full of interest and which taught me, more than any other experience I had ever undergone, the changes which have taken place in the last three centuries. When I look back upon my own time my former life. seems but a distressing dream, and I see how uncivilized, how brutish, we were in the nineteenth century.

There is little more to be said. The professor returned to his work, and by his aid and the aid of some of his friends my case was put before the public, and it resulted, as you all know, in my being appointed a teacher of medieval history in Howard College.

I wish to express to you all my deepest thanks for the consideration with which I have been treated, and I assure you it has been appreciated. As for myself and my work, I feel that the teaching of the history

of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is all that I am capable of doing, and I feel keenly at times the difference between myself and those born in this enlightened age. I realize fully now the monstrous evils which existed in my day, but it is impossible that my nineteenth-century methods of thought should change quickly; that will take time, and I therefore ask forbearance, especially from my students, who, though they are taught by me, must, I am afraid, look upon me more or less as a barbarian. It is my fondest hope that the process of time will eradicate much of this, and that a future will come when I can say, "I am a citizen of the twenty-second century, I am a civilized man." When that comes I shall be extremely happy, because it is the limit of my ambition, and I shall die knowing that I have lived with two generations separated from each other by over two hundred years.

Yes, I have lived; what other man has lived as I have? And life! What a strange affair it is! What a different thing it means to each one of us! Life at best is but a short existence, and in my ignorant times to the majority it was an existence of misery. Ah, truly ignorance is the bane of man

kind, the supporter of tyrants, the worker of evils; but Knowledge, thou art the light, guiding mankind forward to happiness and plenty. It is ever to thee that man must turn for guidance; it is ever to thee he must look for help; to thee he owes everything that is good in his life. Ever growing brighter and brighter, thy light has for centuries been dissipating the mists of ignorance which have befogged the poor weak brain of man.

The progress of man is measured by the increase of knowledge. Literature, music, the fine arts, and religion are but the superficial embellishments of the age in which they exist, and are moulded by it, but in themselves are passive, and exert no influence on progress. s.To what, then, do we owe the present great civilization? I answer, To science. Not to great novelists, poets, composers, painters, or priests, but to those who, in obscurity, and perhaps ridiculed by their contemporaries, have spent their life unravelling the complex phenomena of nature, and thereby given to man that greatest of all things-science. Let a people have literature, music, art, and religion as much as you will; without science their condition will never change.

What is that which has weakened superstition, which has moulded religion into respectability, which has overthrown forever the power of kings, which has broken down race hatred, which has destroyed the worst diseases that afflicted the human race? Is it literature? A novel, perhaps, or a poem? Is it music? A symphony, you think? Is it art? A painting or, it may be, a statue? Is it religion? A creed or the life of a priest? . Tell me, is it any of these? Is the suit a man wears the cause of his actions? What are all these but the suit worn by the age, the outside garments which show the historian the character of the times? That is all they are, and that is all they ever can be. To know a man you must do more than examine his clothes; you must converse with him and find your way to his brain. The historian must do the same, and the brain of the age is the science of the age.

Progress depends upon two things: first the accumulation, and then the diffusion, of knowledge; and these should go hand in hand to attain the best results. Scepticism leads to investigation, and investigation leads to the accumulation of knowledge. To believe is to remain stationary, to doubt is to progress.

/ Let every man, then, investigate for himself, adopt systems, not because they are old, but because they are good, not because they exist, but because they should exist. Let every man think for himself and express his thoughts freely. This is the philosophy of the twenty-second century, and its goal is happiness and plenty.