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. It is when
we contemplate the moral aspect of that contrast that we find ourselves in the
presence of a phenomenon for which history offers no precedent, however far back
we may cast our eye. One might almost be excused who should exclaim, Here,
surely, is something like a miracle! Nevertheless, when we give over idle
wonder, and begin to examine the seeming prodigy critically, we find it no
prodigy at all, much less a miracle. It is not necessary to suppose a moral new
birth of humanity, or a wholesale destruction