THE WRECK OF A WORLD.
CHAPTER I.
In the summer of the year 1948 the English-speaking race had attained the very summit of prosperity. Within the limits of the United States were included no less than one hundred and fifty millions of souls, while the Canadian Provinces held thirty millions more. The Continent of Australia, the Islands of New Zealand, the Settlements of South Africa, and other territories held by the all-colonising Anglo-Saxon had increased in corresponding measure, while the mother-country, though less congested than in the latter part of the nineteenth century, thanks to judicious schemes of emigration, still reckoned in its islands a total of nearly thirty millions. In all it was reckoned that no less than two hundred and seventy millions of persons spoke the English tongue and flourished under English institutions.
