is still alive, and now even in a fair way to recover his health, and to govern more decently than before.
Changes in English life, 1815–1911; the age of inventions.One point I have left till the last. When your great-grandfathers were young, the fastest method of travelling was in a stage-coach with four horses at ten miles an hour, or in a private (and very expensive) post-chaise which might perhaps do twelve miles an hour. When they wanted to light their candles and fires (and they had nothing else to light) they had to strike a spark with a bit of steel on a bit of flint. The navy was built of oak instead of steel, and moved by sails instead of steam. Letters cost twopence apiece for the smallest weight and the smallest distance; a single-sheet letter from London to Edinburgh cost 1s. 1d.
Look round you and see in what a different England you now live. Gas was first used in the streets of London in 1812; but gas already is going, and electric light is taking its place. The first railway was opened in 1829 between Liverpool and Manchester; already people are wondering when the first service of passenger airships will begin to cut out railways for long journeys, as electric tramways and motor-cars have begun to cut out horses and railways alike for short ones. The first steamship began to ply on the Clyde in 1812; it was of three horse-power and moved at five miles an hour; the Mauretania, of 78,000 horse-power, now crosses the Atlantic in less than five days. During the Great War a system of wooden signals from hill-top to hill-top, worked by hand, would carry a message from Dover to London in about an hour; now the electric telegraph flashes messages round the world in a few minutes. By another kind of wire, the telephone, a man in London can talk to a man in Paris, and they can hear each
