This condition, however, is so portentous that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that it is what it seems to be, and that it is not a dream.

But the more steadily we look at it, the more real will its appalling features appear to us.

We are literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is new to the experience of humanity; and though the moral dejection we have been dwelling on may have had many seeming counterparts in other times, this is, as it were, solid substance, whereas they were only shadows.

I have pointed out already in my first chapter how unexampled is the state in which the world now finds itself; but we will dwell once again upon its more general features.

Within less than a century, distance has been all but annihilated, and the earth has practically, and to the imagination, been reduced to a fraction of its former size.
Its possible resources have become mean and narrow, set before us as matters of every-day statistics.