development altogether, the rest of the world will be moving on to new phases.  An awakened Asia will be reorganising its social and political conceptions in the light of modern knowledge and modern ideas, and South America will be working out its destinies, perhaps in the form of a powerful confederation of states.  All Europe will be schooling its John Smiths to finer discipline and broader ideas.  It is quite possible that the American John Smiths may have little to brag about in the way of national predominance by A.D. 2000.  It is quite possible that the United States may be sitting meekly at the feet of at present unanticipated teachers.

THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION

(New Year, 1909.)

The Editor of the New York World has asked me to guess the general trend of events in the next thirty years or so with especial reference to the outlook for the State and City of New York.  I like and rarely refuse such cheerful invitations to prophesy.  I have already made a sort of forecast (in my “Anticipations”) of what may happen if the social and economic process goes on fairly smoothly for all that time, and shown a New York relieved from its present congestion by the development of the means of communication, and growing and spreading in wide and splendid suburbs towards Boston and Philadelphia.  I made that forecast before ever I passed Sandy Hook, but my recent visit only enhanced my sense of growth and “go” in things American.  Still, we are nowadays all too apt to think that growth is inevitable and progress in the nature of things; the Wonderful Century, as Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace called the nineteenth, has made us perhaps over-confident and forgetful of the ruins of great cities and confident prides of the past that litter the world, and here I will write about the other alternative, of the progressive process “hitting something,” and smashing.

There are two chief things in modern life that impress me as dangerous and incalculable.  The first of these is the modern currency and financial system, and the second is the chance we take of destructive war.  Let me dwell first of all on the mysterious possibilities of the former, and then point out one or two uneasy developments of the latter.

Now, there is nothing scientific about our currency and finance at all.  It is a thing that has grown up and elaborated itself out of very simple beginnings in the course of a century or so.  Three hundred years ago the edifice had hardly begun to rise from the ground, most property was real, most people lived directly on the land, most business was on a cash basis, oversea trade was a proportionately small affair, labour was locally fixed.  Most of the world was at the level at which much of China remains to-day—­able to get along without even coinage.  It was a rudimentary world from the point of view of the modern financier and industrial organiser.  Well, on that rude,