The greatest progresses of the race are almost always unappreciated at
the time, and are certainly undervalued, except by contrast and
comparison. We must continually turn backward to see how far we have
gone. An individual who is born into a certain condition thinks it as
hard as any other until by experience and comparison he discovers what
his times might have been. As for us, in the year 1894, we are not
compelled to look backward very far to observe a striking contrast.

[Illustration: IN OLD TIMES. PRYING OUT A "BLOOM."]

All the wealth of today is built upon the forests and prairies and
swamps of yesterday, and we must take a wider and more comprehensive
glance backward if we should wish to institute those comparisons which
make contrasts startling.

We are accustomed to read and to hear of the "Age" of this or that.
There was a "Stone" Age, beginning with the tribes to whom it came
before the beginnings of their history, or even of tradition, and if we
look far backward we may contrast our own time with the times of men who
knew no metals. They were men. They lived and hoped and died as we do,
even in what is now our own country. Often they were not even
barbarians. They builded houses and forts, and dug drains and built
aqueducts, and tilled the soil. They knew the value of those things we
most value now, home and country; and they organized armies, and fought
battles, and died for an idea, as we do. Yet all the time, a time ages
long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was
the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment
beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of
polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle.
All men have in their time burned and scraped and fashioned all they