KEW GARDENS. 
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and this wonderful revolution that has been brought about 
by railways, and steamships, and telegraphs, how we have 
been growing gradually more and more luxurious in our 
habits of daily life, and how the spread of education and the 
popularisation of art, and the enormous increase that has 
taken place in the last generation in the number of those who 
possess incomes of moderate competence, have increased the 
quantity and quality of the things which as a nation we 
consider that we need to enable us to live our daily lives in 
contentment and comfort; and how that now more than ever 
the mass of the nation will have an influence in making the 
laws and controlling the great issues of our national, foreign, 
and colonial policy. 
Reflect upon the melancholy testimony borne also by the 
historic record ; how, through man’s greediness, improvidence, 
and quarrelsomeness, many of the countries which supported 
the great nations of antiquity have been robbed of their 
natural beauty and fertility. Pass round the basin of the 
Mediterranean and compare the state of things now with 
what it once was, in Persia, in the valleys of the Euphrates 
and Tigris, in Syria, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Greece, in 
Northern Africa, in Cyprus and Sicily, and, in a lesser degree, 
in Spain and Italy. Everywhere we find the same sad 
contrast of wide tracts of country that were once fertile corn- 
land now changed to sandy deserts and pestilential marshes; 
aqueducts and roads ruined by neglect and violence; vineyards 
and olive gardens, and groves of date palms, ruthlessly 
destroyed, and mountains that once were sheltered by groves 
of oak and pine and chestnut changed to bare stony ridges, 
of which the water-springs have been dried up and the grassy 
sward parched away, and the coating of alluvial soil which 
the roots of the trees kept in its place carried away by the 
rain to silt up the rivers and harbours of the lowlands. 
Contrast the Carthage of Regulus and Scipio Africanus with 
the Tunis of to-day; or the Cyprus that was ruled by the 
Venetians, when the island maintained a population of one 
million, to the Cyprus which was handed over a few years 
ago by the Turks to the English, when the population had 
sunk to 140,000 ; or the Lebanon of to-day with the Lebanon 
of Hiram and Solomon; or the Assyria of to-day with the 
Nineveh of Jonah, Sennacherib, and Asurbanipal; or the 
Babylonian plain as it is now with what it was in the days of 
Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar. 
We are told by Herodotus that the walls of Babylon were 
a square fifty miles in circumference, and that the Babylonian 
territory supported, not only its own resident population, but 
