THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. 27 



greater than our own inheritance from all the centuries that have 

 gone before. 



Some may regret that, while only one third of Wallace's book 

 is devoted to the successes of the wonderful century, the author 

 finds the remaining two thirds none too much for the enumeration 

 of some of its most notable failures; but it is natural for one who 

 has borne his own distinguished part in all this marvelous progress 

 to ask where the century has fallen short of the enthusiastic hopes 

 of its leaders, what that it might have done it has failed to do, and 

 what lies ready at the hand of the workers who will begin the new 

 century with this rich inheritance of new thoughts, new methods, 

 and new resources. 



The more we realize the vast possibilities of human welfare 

 which science has given us the more, he says, must we recognize 

 our total failure to make any adequate use of them. 



Along with this continuous progress in science, in the arts, 

 and in wealth-production, which has dazzled our imaginations 

 to such an extent that we can hardly admit the possibility of any 

 serious evils having accompanied or been caused by it, there has, 

 he says, been many serious failures — intellectual, social, and moral. 

 Some of our great thinkers, he says, have been so impressed by the 

 terrible nature of these failures that they have doubted whether 

 the final result of the work of the century has any balance of good 

 over evil, of happiness over misery, for mankind at large. 



Wallace is no pessimist, but one who believes that the first 

 step in retrieving our failures is to perceive clearly where we have 

 failed, for he says there can be no doubt of the magnitude of the 

 evils that have grown up or persisted in the midst of all our tri- 

 umphs over natural forces and our unprecedented growth in wealth 

 and luxury, and he holds it not the least important part of his work 

 to call attention to some of these failures. 



With ample knowledge of the sources of health, we allow and 

 even compel the bulk of our population to live and work under 

 conditions which greatly shorten life. In our mad race for wealth 

 we have made gold more sacred than human life; we have made 

 life so hard for many that suicide and insanity and crime are alike 

 increasing. The struggle for wealth has been accompanied by a 

 reckless destruction of the stored-up products of Nature, which is 

 even more deplorable because irretrievable, l^ot only have forest 

 growths of many hundred years been cleared away, often with dis- 

 astrous consequences, but the whole of the mineral treasures of 

 the earth's surface, the slow productions of long-past eras of time 

 and geological change, have been and are still being exhausted with 

 reckless disregard of our duties to posterity and solely in the in- 



