Darkness and Dawn

Allan watched the monorail vanish beyond the huge north tower of the cable bridge, sink through the trees, and finally fade into the gathering gloom.

"The Great Lakes Express," said he. "In the old days we thought seventy miles an hour something stupendous. Now two hundred is mere ordinary schedule-time. Yes--something has been accomplished even now. The greater time still to be--we can't hope to see it.

"But we can catch a glimpse of what it shall be, here and there. We must be content to have built foundations. On them those who shall come in the future shall raise a fairer and a mightier world than any we have ever dreamed."

Again he relapsed into silence; but his arm drew round Beatrice, and together they sat watching the age-old yet ever-new drama of the birth of night.

Half heard, mingled with the eternal turmoil of the rapids, rose the far purring of the giant dynamos in the power-houses below the cliff. Here, there, lights began to gleam in the city; and on the rolling farmlands to northward, too, little winking eyes of light opened one by one, each one a home.

Suddenly the man spoke again.

"More than a hundred thousand of us already!" he exulted. "Over a tenth of a million--and every year the growth is faster, ever faster, in swift progressions. A hundred thousand English-speaking people, Beta; a civilization already, even in a material sense, superior to the old one that was swept away; in a spiritual, moral sense, how vastly far ahead!

"A hundred thousand! Some time, before long, it will be a million; then two, five, twenty, a hundred, with no racial discords, no mutual antipathies, no barriers of name or blood; but for the first time a universal race, all sound and pure, starting right, living right, striving toward a goal which even we cannot foresee!

"Not only shall this land be filled, but Europe, Asia, Africa and all the islands of the Seven Seas shall know the hand of man again, and own his sovereignty, from pole to pole!"

His clasp about Beatrice tightened; she felt his heart beat strong with deep emotion as he spoke again: "Already the cities are beginning to arise from their ashes of a thousand oblivious years. Already a score of thriving colonies have scattered from the capital, all yet bound to it with monorail cables, with electric wires and with the ether-borne magic of the wireless.

"Already our boy, our son--can you imagine him really a man of thirty, darling?--elected President on our last Council Day, guides a free people--a people self-reliant and strong, energetic, capable, dominant.