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EING now past eighty years of age I know that I must soon pack up and be

gone, but I am unwilling to take my

departure without leaving something behind which will be useful not only to those who are living, but to all who may live hereafter, even if this world should last a million years; and I doubt if it will hold out longer. For we are so busy with scratching into the earth and getting out of her all kinds of things and using them as fast as we can, and using ourselves too, that I doubt if we shall be able to go on at this rate very long. Unless Nature, the god of the philosophers, is in some way unknown to us making amends for the waste of her children and storing up new materials, we must stop for want of stuff; just as the Lancashire mills must stop, if the

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Confederate States won't grow cotton enough for us, or refuse to sell it when they have grown it, which is not very likely, or unless somebody else is good enough to make somebody work at cottongrowing for our benefit, not forgetting their own. If Nature is not doing this, I cannot see that anything else will be left for her except to make the world over again some day and to bring fresh materials up to the top by ploughing deeper. This operation will certainly cause a great disturbance and be very like what we call turning things upside down. Pyramids, temples, palaces and cotton mills; emperors, kings, queens and popes; prime-ministers, members of parliament and shoe-blacks will all be buried more than forty fathom deep; and perhaps shoe-blacks may lie above kings, though it matters little whether they are above them or below them, for even now a king is forgotten as soon as a shoeblack, and before he is well laid in his grave men are bending the knee before somebody who is standing in his shoes.

These philosophical reflections have long made me hesitate about writing this book, for I cannot bear the thought of its perishing, after all my trouble in making it, either by the general conflagration, which

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