YOU ASK me to put on my seer's cap, transport myself to the glorious future that Edward Bellamy prophesies in his now celebrated novel, "Looking Backward," and paint the fields and pastures as they will then appear. While I am about it, is it not just as well to use a telescope as an opera-glass, and precipitate the reader into the forty-ninth instead of the twenty-first century ? Then we may truly hope to see the foundations of government and of society based upon truth and justice, and life's possibilities realized to some extent.

My cap is on : I see, as through a glass, darkly at first, but the outlines gradually strengthen; the films of shadow and of gray light separate into seashore, river' basin and prairie ; cumulous balloons, glowing with sunshine, settle down into broad-based mountain ranges, and great cities sparkle wherever the highways of communication make cross-roads. This is Continental America, a true Democracy, where The Government is only another phrase for The People - where The Government is The People! A population, vast beyond the dreams of the nineteenth century, now covers the continent. Rivet banks that the beaver once overflowed by his engineering feats are now populous with towns; every town of old has become a city, every city a metropolis, every metropolis a cosmopolis - with its every human dwelling and workshop a little city in itself, towering to the sky.

And the fields, the pastures, the grain prairies, the woodlands - they are still here, although scarcely recognizable. To support a population, whereof every thousand of old represents a present million, and where every unit of this million now lives in comfort and plenty - this means myriad changes in methods of production and distribution. There are now no waste places ; nature never wastes, and man has learned to take nature at her best and conform his ways to hers. Horticulture has supplanted agriculture, and every acre is studied and stimulated to do what it best can do, just as every man is ex-pected to exert his best faculties in his most suitable field of action.

Whatever is produced is preserved, for waste is recognized as a form of wickedness that must mean want to some one, even if the waster himself is exempted from the inevitable penalty. Every berry, every fruit, however perishable, is promptly submitted to the improved processes that chemistry has taught, and so prepared that it shall be ready for future need. The waste of past ages constitutes the riches of the present era, and fills to overflowing vast storehouses of food products that now gird the globe and prevent all possibility of hunger.

The problem of transportation has been solved. No one center is allowed to become overstocked with the world's goods at the expense of less favored out-skirting provinces. Where the need is, there fly the needfuls. Railways, and road vehicles propelled by power, now net the land; while the seas are highways over which processions of electrical ships bear their brimming food-baskets. Thereby, the Grand Council of nations is able to deal with the globe as the market gardener of old did with his garden plat; whatever corner is best suited to a certain product, that corner is devoted to that product and to that alone. Africa is now the world's hothouse, and the scent and flavor of its fruits make glad every table in the world; while the grain fields of the north return their appropriate quota. The luxurious wastefulness of constraining nature to half-do things, out of latitude and out of season, is no longer practicable.

And man, what has become of man in this process of revolution ? He has simply taken his proper place in nature's beneficent plan. He is no longer a beast of burden. He works still - works more industriously than ever before, but he works hopefully, manfully, as he was meant to work - with his brain as well as his back, as planner and director, rather than as a brute force. He works intelligently, with agents that he understands, and in the direction of assured results, so that every stroke counts. He has trained the forces of nature to do his brute work. He has even taught them to relieve his brute companions of a large part of their work. Oxen no longer painfully drag the plough through stony ground; horses no longer pant under thrice normal loads. Steam and electricity and motive forces whereof the nineteenth century had no knowledge, now form the muscles of the world's arms, and catch their power from the tides and the winds. Man has ceased battling with nature, and taken her into willing co-partnership. Her weed pests and her insect pests have either been yoked into service, or left no opportunity for propagation. So-called accidents of nature are no longer complained of, but from them her laws have been codified.

Knowledge has became power in its broadest sense.

And pleasure - has that any part. in the scheme of the forty-ninth century ? Aye! to an extent that the nineteenth century knew not of; willing work, in fields fitted to the capacities of the worker, is of itself one of the highest forms of pleasure; and the absence of all fear of future want, for himself or his family, affords that contentment and peace of mind that alone can give to leisure any possibility of pleasurable recreation.

The experimental age has past; the age of reali-zation has come; the earth blossoms like the rose, and man laughs in the rose-field that nature and he have together created.

George Houghton.