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THE CHILD-HAND TO-DAY
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garden to get some notion of the kind of thing to expect at any period, to know, for example, when the dexterity should appear that will one day become intelligence, and when to look for that kind of practical gift that will by-and-bye flower—it may be in late days—into a power of abstraction. It must be possible to gain this kind of insight, or why should the kindergarten have come at all?

And it must be possible to see at last why some human plants will never flower at all—why the movement of life does not swing upward, but decline early, or refuse to mount; to see why a message boy is content to be a casual or a loafer at last, and to have no part in the stirring changes of the world-garden.

All the while the human race is forging ahead—or rather, the happier members of it are forging ahead. There is no mistaking the fact of projection carrying them on, freeing them for new effort, and the prophecy of unknown and undreamed-of secrets of the organism itself shadowed forth in our projected cable telephones and wireless telegraphy. In this whirlwind we call science, the favoured few are borne forward, but in the stress of industrial life some of the fittest are destroyed and flung aside.