Because I am chiefly impressed by the fact not that Mr. Holt has taken days where weeks were needed fifty years ago, but that he has done it very comfortably, without undue physical exertion, and at no greater expense, I suppose, than it cost Dickens, whom the journey nearly killed.

If Mr. Holt’s expenses were higher, it was for the special trains and the sake of the record.  Anyone taking ordinary trains and ordinary passages may do what he has done in eighteen or twenty days.

When I was a boy, “Around the World in Eighty Days” was still a brilliant piece of imaginative fiction.  Now that is almost an invalid’s pace.  It will not be very long before a man will be able to go round the world if he wishes to do so ten times in a year.  And it is perhaps forgivable if those who, like Jules Verne, saw all these increments in speed, motor-cars, and airships aeroplanes, and submarines, wireless telegraphy and what not, as plain and necessary deductions from the promises of physical science, should turn upon a world that read and doubted and jeered with “I told you so. Now will you respect a prophet?”

It was not that the prophets professed any mystical and inexplicable illumination at which a sceptic might reasonably mock; they were prepared with ample reasons for the things they foretold.  Now, quite as confidently, they point on to a new series of consequences, high probabilities that follow on all this tremendous development of swift, secure, and cheapened locomotion, just as they followed almost necessarily upon the mechanical developments of the last century.

Briefly, the ties that bind men to place are being severed; we are in the beginning of a new phase in human experience.

For endless ages man led the hunting life, migrating after his food, camping, homeless, as to this day are many of the Indians and Esquimaux in the Hudson Bay Territory.  Then began agriculture, and for the sake of securer food man tethered himself to a place.  The history of man’s progress from savagery to civilisation is essentially a story of settling down.  It begins in caves and shelters; it culminates in a wide spectacle of farms and peasant villages, and little towns among the farms.  There were wars, crusades, barbarous invasions, set-backs, but to that state all Asia, Europe, North Africa worked its way with an indomitable pertinacity.  The enormous majority of human beings stayed at home at last; from the cradle to the grave they lived, married, died in the same district, usually in the same village; and to that condition, law, custom, habits, morals, have adapted themselves.  The whole plan and conception of human society is based on the rustic home and the needs and characteristics of the agricultural family.  There have been gipsies, wanderers, knaves, knights-errant and adventurers, no doubt, but the settled permanent rustic home and the tenure of land about it, and the hens and the cow, have constituted the fundamental