LOOKING BACKWARD.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9050, 27 March 1908, Page 4

LOOKING BACKWARD.

People are prone, when they are getting on in years, to prate of "the good old days," and to contrast the present unfavourably with the past. This is mainly due to want of reflection, or to —liver. The tendency of civilisation is steadily progressive, and notwithstanding the multitude of evils which still exist, and will exist despite a high state of civilisation, who can truthfully say the world is no better to-day than it was one hundred years ago, or fifty, or even ten years ago? Bishop Welldon, Dean of Manchester, recently delivered a lecture in that city, in which be compared the past with the present, and his view of the social conditions of life then and now is indicated in his prefatory remarks —"I would not exchange the twentieth century for any that have gone before it; my only regret is that I do not live in the twenty-first." The Bishop went on to state, chronologically, some of the reasons for his preference. "If you lived before the thirteenth century you would have had no sugar," he said. "At the beginning of the fifteenth century you would have had no butter; in the sixteenth century no potatoes and no tobacco; in the seventeenth no tea, cofee, or soap. I.am afraid that our ancestors were all dirty. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were no lamps and no umbrellas; at the beginning of the nineteenth no trains, matches, telegrams, gas, or chloroform. William the Conqueror ate with his fingers; Chaucer never saw a printed book; Queen Elizabeth never heard of tea or saw a newspaper; and Queen Victoria was the first Sovereign of England not dependent on wind aid weather for opportunity of leaving her island home." Every improvement of higher civilisation has had to contend against strenuous opposition. The lecturer pointed out that Holinshed, the Elizabethan chronicler, protested against the "new-fangled notion" which allowed smoke to ascend up a given channel, instead of through cracks and crevice 3 of a house's walls. The evils of a degenerate age were ascribed by John Wesley to the practice of tea drinking. (What would he think of his followers today?) Matches were called lucifers, because of sorhi! supposed connection with the evil one. The use of anaesthetics, one of the greatest and most blessed discoveries of science, was fought against. The objectors to chloroform afforded Sir James Simpson an opportunity tu cite Scripture in its defence. God had, he said, put Adam unto a deep sleep before taking a rib from his body. This was■ a clever retort, but history does not say if it was effective. So late as 1771, said the Bishop, an advertisement for the sale of a negro slave appeared in the "Birmingham Gazette." Many other evils associated with the past were alluded to, and their suppression and the greatly improved social conditions of to-day were, the Bishop thought, due to the increase of humanity, which was a marked feature in the progress of civilisation. All this goes to show, if it were possible to have any doubt upon the subject, how infinitely better off we of this generation are compare;) with past generations, and infe-s.still'better things for the generations to come.