been may in some small measure teach us to discern in the future the opportunity, to seize which—if there be no one man with sufficient wisdom, power, and virtue—there may be found a combination of men whose aggregate wisdom, power, and virtue may be sufficient to turn the march of events out of the night of civilization's destruction which some prophets see close ahead, into the brighter day foreseen by the seers of the Millennium.
I cannot afford, as some greater story-tellers have calmly and confidently done, to ignore the possibilities, not to mention the probabilities. But, some may say, your story of the mass of gold is an utter impossibility. Not so. That such a mass of gold has never been found is true; that it does not exist and cannot be discovered by no means follows. If the theory is true that the surface of the earth was once molten and liquid, the gold, by its immense weight, must have sunk below the lighter elements so far that when the crust of the earth became solid it could have come to the surface only by means of an eruption from a great depth. That the amount of gold in the whole globe is so small, in comparison with the rest of the materials, as seems from the
