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DO OUR SOULS COME BACK AND LIVE IN OTHER BODIES?

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"WELL, IT'S JUST A FRIENDLY GAME'

IMAGINATION IS POWER

WE LONG FOR IMMORTAL IMPERFECTION-WE CAN'T HAVE IT 133

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD-PARABLE OF THE BLIND KITTENS

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WOMAN SUSTAINS, GUIDES AND CONTROLS THE WORLD
TWO KINDS OF DISCONTENT

THE EARTH IS ONLY A FRONT YARD

THE COW THAT KICKS HER WEANED CALF IS ALL HEART 184

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Fifty Years Past-and Fifty to Come

What the past has seen, we know. What will the future show?

MILLIONS of men on this earth remember distinctly the past fifty years, and their fathers remembered fifty years farther back. The hundred years behind us have seen a complete change in the ways of human beings and in the world's methods. The stage coach went, steam cars and steamboats came in.

The telephone has come-conquering space.

The wireless telephone and telegraph have comeconquering space and time.

The flying machine has lifted men from the earthconquering the law of gravitation.

The automobile has replaced the horse on city streets, and will replace it on the farm.

Electricity has lightened the labors of women, sweeping, washing, heating, refrigerating, sewing, cooling, lighting, driving machines, executing convicts.

Man, born with ten fingers, provides himself through electricity and machinery with a thousand million fingers of steel.

Women vote, the law allows it.

Men have no right to drink, the Constitution forbids it.

Nations gather together and bargain, as individuals

They do not keep their bargains well, and do not repay the billions they borrow. But there is at least a start in international dealing to replace international war.

Savages, as individuals, when they first bargained and borrowed, did not keep their bargains or repay borrowings, either.

Fifty years ago, the man that had one million was looked up to-he was that wonderful thing, "a millionaire." Today, a man with an annual income of only one million is not "so very rich." One man among us has an income of more than two million dollars a week. And Henry Ford, who manufactures the cheapest thing in his line, pays to the Government an income tax of forty millions or more a year.

The world used to talk of millions, and hardly believed in their reality. It now talks of billions. A bonus for the soldiers will require five billions. Before the Government finishes with allowances to injured soldiers and others engaged in the late war, it will spend probably seventy-five billions. Europe owes us eleven billions we probably shall never get the money.

And so it goes. We have reached the age of the billionaire, with the billion as the international unit.

The last fifty years have been years of big things, built up by the power of big crowds working together. But the individual man is not much bigger, better or happier than he was. The Pacific Ocean is big, but a drop of water in that ocean is no bigger or more powerful than a drop of water in your wash basin. Men are still little human things, drops in a human ocean con

drops not changing much in themselves.

How can they change? How can the individual be made greater, his life more complete, worth while? That is the question that the last fifty years and the last thousand centuries have done little to answer.

Man has discovered radium in the ground, new elements in nature, new metals, new forces. But he has done little to change or improve himself. It is probably true that the average intelligence among the higher races of civilized man is lower today than it was among the free citizens of Athens twenty-five hundred years ago.

Scientifically and mechanically, in skill and in understanding of our surroundings, from the oil well at our feet to the distant nebula, we improve. But as individuals, as a human race, we have advanced and improved little.

What will come in the next fifty years, or the next century, the period that will be lived through by our children and grandchildren?

There will be talk of exhausted coal mines and oil wells. That will mean no more than the lack of whales means now to our lighting system. There was a time when men worried thinking they would have no oil for their lamps, and go back to tallow candles, if the whales were all killed off. Kerosene and electricity settled that.

Before coal and oil are gone, men will harness the tides, the power of the sun itself, or tap hidden fires in the earth a few miles below our feet, and wonder that their ancestors ever dug underground for coal.

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