Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 114, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1913 — A VISION OF THE FUTURE. [ARTICLE]

A VISION OF THE FUTURE.

A vision of the future rises. I see our. country filled with happy homes, with firesides of content—the foremost land of all the earth. • I see a world where thrones have crumbled and where kings are dust. The aristocracy of Idleness has perished from the earth. I see a world without a slave; Man at last is free. Nature’s forces have by science been enslaved. Lightning and light, wind and wave, frost and flame and all the secret, subtle powers of earth and air are the tireless toilers for the human race. I see a world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music’s myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth—a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet’s" shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl trying to win bread with the needle—the needle that has been called “the asp for the breast of the poor”—is not driven to the desperate choice of crime or death, of suicide, or shame. I see a world without the beggar’s outstretched palm, the misers’s heartless, stony stare, the piteous wail of want, the livid lips T>f lies, the cruel eyes of scorn. ‘ r I see a race without disease of flesh or brain—shapely and fair, the married harmony of form and function—and as I look life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth, and over all in the great dome shines the eternal star of human hope.—Robert Ingersoll.