If one were of a speculative frame of mind and chose to take as the basis for a calculation the increase in tourists between 1855, when the ten pioneers started for Paris, and the number "personally conducted" over land and sea today, and then glance forward at what the future will be if this ratio of increase is maintained the result would be something too awful for words.For if ten have become a million in forty years, what will be the total in 1955?
Nothing less than entire nations given over to sight-seeing, passing their lives and incomes in rushing aimlessly about.
If the facilities of communication increase as they undoubtedly will with the demand, the prospect becomes nearer the idea of a "Walpurgis Night" than anything else.For the earth and the sea will be covered and the air filled with every form of whirling, flying, plunging device to get men quickly from one place to another.
Every human being on the globe will be flying South for the cold months and North for the hot season.
As personally conducted tours have been so satisfactory, agencies will be started to lead us through all the stages of existence.
Parents will subscribe on the birth of their children to have them personally conducted through life and everything explained as it is done at present in the galleries abroad; food, lodging and reading matter, husbands and wives will be provided by contract, to be taken back and changed if unsatisfactory, as the big stores do with their goods.Delightful prospect! Homes will become superfluous, parents and children will only meet when their "tours" happen to cross each other.Our great-grandchildren will float through life freed from every responsibility and more perfectly independent than even that delightful dreamer, Bellamy, ventured to predict.