Excerpt from The Meaning of Modern Life as Sought for and Interpreted in a Series of Lectures and Addresses by the Leaders of Modern Thought and Modern Action
When, as sometimes happens, a tattered manuscript of medi?val times is resurrected from amid forgotten rubbish heaps, scholars hesitate and argue as to the century of its production. Accidental outward marks may guide them; but as to the thought, the outlook, the opinions, there is little to discriminate one century from the next, or the next. Mankind did march onward, it is true, but with such slow step that they seemed often to be merely marking time without advance. The unsolved problems of one generation were still disputed by their children"s children.
Now, however, we move at railroad speed. The problems of to-day are not those of two decades ago; and at such accelerating rate do we rush onward that soon a year may see changes such as once engrossed a century. Nay, so swiftly are we swept face to face with new issues that the dead past at times forgets to bury its dead. There are elderly gentlemen among us, held by a comfortable income in some eddy of the current, who still maintain that the only vital issue of to-day is England"s attitude towards us in the Civil War or the fact that Japan began her modern career under our tutelage in 1854.
To these pleasantly reminiscent gentlemen, charming after-dinner speakers, interesting relics of an extinct age, the present series of addresses can possess little interest, except for its "newness," the radical spirit of its thought. But to more active brains, to the men who, in office, in factory, or in field, are "making the nation" of to-day, it must have an obvious value.
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