And yet--I KNOW that if the thought be taken out of life that it is
worth while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national
spirit will be gone. I KNOW that a long peace makes for weakness in a
race. I KNOW that without war there is still death. To me this last
fact is the consolation. It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea
deliberately faced, than to die of old age in one's bed; and the grief
of parting no one ever born can escape. Still it is puzzling to us
simple folk--the feeling that fundamental things do not change: that the
balance of good and evil has not changed. We change our fashions, we
change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets
Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and
interested. We pride ourselves that science at least has
progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors. Yet we are no
cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens and Rome
ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we know to-day was
known and lost. Oh, I can hear you claiming more happiness for the
masses! I wonder. There is no actual buying and selling in open slave
markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the
stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the
workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know.
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