Cosmopolitan Magazine
Man's Machine-Made Millennium
By Hudson Maxim
Illustrated by William R. Leigh
Editor's Note. — It is a wonderful picture that Hudson Maxim has conceived in his scientific mind and thrown on the screen in this article. Daringly peering into the future, he makes one gasp as he predicts the machine-made millennium.'
The discovery of a radio-motor, says Mr. Maxim, will make power so cheap that none will work save for recreation; crystallization of fertilizer out of the atmosphere will make the earth so prolific that farming will he a pastime; disinfectant solutions forced through the body will exterminate all germs, and disease will be eliminated; life insurance companies will become simply accident insurance companies, and man's life will run its allotted span; criminals will no longer he imprisoned, but will he segregated in a great reservation where they will live out their lives, the right to propagate their kind denied them, thus eventually cleansing the world of its criminal element; the mastery of the air will liberate mankind from the limitations of navigable rivers and railroad tracts; gold will be so common that it will be used for rifle bullets; diamonds as big as the Kohinoor will be made for a dollar, and the city of the future will not be a collection of buildings, but one vast arcaded building with its subdivisions carefully allotted for the needs of its inhabitants.
Could we fly out through space, and with a speed sufficiently great, we should overtake the rays of reflected light that left our earth thousands and millions of years ago; and had we infinite eyes we could, as we went, look back and behold the history of our earth unravel, see the return of man to the ape-like thing, see him and all animate forms finally converge upon the moneron plunged in the azoic sea.
What a wonder-world would the panorama be, could we similarly take wing into the future and follow man up the ascending scale until he shall have reached the zenith of physical, intellectual, and ethical life, whence he will look back upon us, his progenitors, with the same curious regard that moves us as we look down the line of our ascent upon the little lemur, parent of the ape-progenitor of man! Following down the descending scale,
