PREFACE.
Should coming events not tally in every minute particular with the forecast incidental to the following pages, the reader will perhaps make allowance. Historians are not always quite agreed even as to the past; in writing the history of the future, the difficulties are obvious. It is curious, nevertheless, that although the rough copy of this work was written about five years ago, political affairs seem to be tending in the direction of its partial realisation.
But the characters are all fictitious, and therefore reflect upon no one. They are but ‘shadows passing through the gloom’ toward that light and hope of the world which cannot be reached by secular reforms alone, however thorough. For to raise woman and, at the same time, to depress the religious sentiment
