Anticipations | Page 9

It may be a shock, perhaps, to some minds, but I
must confess I do not see what is to prevent the process of elimination that is beginning
now with the heavy vans spreading until it covers all horse traffic, and with the
disappearance of horse hoofs and the necessary filth of horses, the road surface may be
made a very different thing from what it is at present, better drained and admirably
adapted for the soft-tired hackney vehicles and the torrent of cyclists. Moreover, there
will be little to prevent a widening of the existing side walks, and the protection of the
passengers from rain and hot sun by awnings, or such arcades as distinguish Turin, or Sir
F. Bramwell's upper footpaths on the model of the Chester rows. Moreover, there is no
reason but the existing filth why the roadways should not have translucent velaria to pull
over in bright sunshine and wet weather. It would probably need less labour to
manipulate such contrivances than is required at present for the constant conflict with
slush and dust. Now, of course, we tolerate the rain, because it facilitates a sort of
cleaning process....
Enough of this present speculation. I have indicated now the general lines of the roads
and streets and ways and underways of the Twentieth Century. But at present they stand
vacant in our prophecy, not only awaiting the human interests--the characters and
occupations, and clothing of the throng of our children and our children's children that
flows along them, but also the decorations our children's children's taste will dictate, the
advertisements their eyes will tolerate, the shops in which they will buy. To all that we
shall finally come, and even in the next chapter I hope it will be made more evident how
conveniently these later and more intimate matters follow, instead of preceding, these
present mechanical considerations. And of the beliefs and hopes, the thought and
language, the further prospects of this multitude as yet unborn--of these things also we
shall make at last certain hazardous guesses. But at first I would submit to those who may

find the "machinery in motion" excessive in this chapter, we must have the background
and fittings--the scene before the play.[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In the earlier papers, of which this is the first, attention will be given to the probable
development of the civilized community in general. Afterwards these generalizations will
be modified in accordance with certain broad differences of race, custom, and religion.
[2] Of quite serious forecasts and inductions of things to come, the number is very small
indeed; a suggestion or so of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution, some
hints from Mr. Archdall Reid, some political forecasts, German for the most part
(Hartmann's Earth in the Twentieth Century, e.g.), some incidental forecasts by Professor
Langley (Century Magazine, December, 1884, e.g.), and such isolated computations as
Professor Crookes' wheat warning, and the various estimates of our coal supply, make
almost a complete bibliography. Of fiction, of course, there is abundance: Stories of the
Year 2000, and Battles of Dorking, and the like--I learn from Mr. Peddie, the
bibliographer, over one hundred pamphlets and books of that description. But from its
very nature, and I am writing with the intimacy of one who has tried, fiction can never be
satisfactory in this application. Fiction is necessarily concrete and definite; it permits of
no open alternatives; its aim of illusion prevents a proper amplitude of demonstration,
and modern prophecy should be, one submits, a branch of speculation, and should follow
with all decorum the scientific method. The very form of fiction carries with it something
of disavowal; indeed, very much of the Fiction of the Future pretty frankly abandons the
prophetic altogether, and becomes polemical, cautionary, or idealistic, and a mere
footnote and commentary to our present discontents.
[3] It might have been used in the same way in Italy in the first century, had not the
grandiose taste for aqueducts prevailed.
[4] And also into the Cornwall mines, be it noted.
[5] It might be worse. If the biggest horses had been Shetland ponies, we should be
travelling now in railway carriages to hold two each side at a maximum speed of perhaps
twenty miles an hour. There is hardly any reason, beyond this tradition of the horse, why
the railway carriage should not be even nine or ten feet wide, the width, that is, of the
smallest room in which people can live in comfort, hung on such springs and wheels as
would effectually destroy all vibration, and furnished with all the equipment of
comfortable chambers.
[6] Explosives as a motive power were first attempted by Huyghens and one or two
others in the seventeenth century, and, just as with the turbine type of apparatus,