It would be strange if a fact so extraordinary had not somewhat strongly affected our imaginations.

Perhaps most of us have been stimulated to some effort to realize the society of a century ago, and figure to ourselves what it must have been like to live then.
In inviting you now to consider certain reflections upon this subject which have occurred to me, I presume that I shall rather follow than divert the course of your own thoughts." Edith whispered something to her father at this point, to which he nodded assent and turned to me.
"Mr.West," he said, "Edith suggests that you may find it slightly embarrassing to listen to a discourse on the lines Mr.Barton is laying down, and if so, you need not be cheated out of a sermon.

She will connect us with Mr.Sweetser's speaking room if you say so, and I can still promise you a very good discourse." "No, no," I said.

"Believe me, I would much rather hear what Mr.Barton has to say." "As you please," replied my host.
When her father spoke to me Edith had touched a screw, and the voice of Mr.Barton had ceased abruptly.

Now at another touch the room was once more filled with the earnest sympathetic tones which had already impressed me most favorably.
"I venture to assume that one effect has been common with us as a result of this effort at retrospection, and that it has been to leave us more than ever amazed at the stupendous change which one brief century has made in the material and moral conditions of humanity.
"Still, as regards the contrast between the poverty of the nation and the world in the nineteenth century and their wealth now, it is not greater, possibly, than had been before seen in human history, perhaps not greater, for example, than that between the poverty of this country during the earliest colonial period of the seventeenth century and the relatively great wealth it had attained at the close of the nineteenth, or between the England of William the Conqueror and that of Victoria.
Although the aggregate riches of a nation did not then, as now, afford any accurate criterion of the masses of its people, yet instances like these afford partial parallels for the merely material side of the contrast between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.