tion, and there are not many students to-day who are inclined to question the general gain for civilization by the breaking of their power.
Surely if in the whole range of history we come upon a country which believed its own efforts indispensable for the progress of the race, it was Renaissance Italy, and it was more nearly right than contemporaries usually have been; but the political power of Italy was then, and remained until the nineteenth century, a shadow. Few countries in the whole history of the race have achieved such wholehearted and unanimous admiration as France possessed in the eighteenth century. Its very name was synonymous with what was to contemporaries civilization itself; its loss or destruction would have seemed irreparable. Yet in 1815 practically the whole civilized world congratulated itself upon the downfall, nay, upon the practical destruction of France, and upon the consequent saving of civilization.
If there is anything in the tenet of the relativity of truth, we have not now and are not likely to have any notion of what is really indispensable to the future of civilization, because we have not and cannot have a definite notion of what the future of civilization is. It ought to be sufficient for us to remember that northwestern Europe, which we now look upon as the seat of civilization, was, at the birth of Christ, scarcely known to be upon the globe, and was in all honesty believed by scientists to be the place where the world came to an end and space began. And in the history of the race and of the world two thousand years are but a moment. In reality we are dealing to-day with essentially different notions of civilization, of its object, of the methods necessary to attain it, of the hands which will perform the work. It is the difference of opinion about the future which lies at the root of the present difficulty, and in that opinion we shall find, as in a looking-glass, the images of the nations as they successively step forward. They differ in their national character, their ideas of morality, their ideas of the future because of their past. Their national aims and ambitions are the result of the history of Europe, the result of their deep hatreds, antagonisms, and rivalries during the fifteen hundred years since their ancestors poured down from the forests of the North upon the provinces of decadent Rome. From such a long and tangled past have come deep-rooted ideas, intense passions, strong beliefs, determinations to prevail. It is with these we have to deal.
Somehow, in some way of which we know nothing, the future civilization will emerge, as in the past, from the clash of these ideals and ambitions. The past makes it clear that civilization will be safeguarded, whatever happens. The future no more depends upon a single race or a single nation than a nation depends upon a single individual. When we talk of worlds, of aeons of time, of the human race itself and the future of its civilization, nations, like individuals, become pygmies and almost disappear from sight. We cannot tell in advance what the future is going to be, we cannot tell in advance which of us will render the service which will be seen a thousand years hence to have been important; but surely we can all be pardoned for believing that we have some part to play in it. The real problem with which we have to deal is not that of providing for civilization's future, but that of providing for civilization's future, but that of providing for the immediate future of those of us who are now alive.
In a Schoolroom
THE other day I amused myself by slipping into a recitation at the suburban high school where I had once studied as a boy. The teacher let me sit, like one of the pupils, at an empty desk in the back of the room, and for an hour I had before my eyes the interesting drama of the American school as it unfolds itself day after day in how many thousands of classrooms throughout the land. I had gone primarily to study the teacher, but I soon found that the pupils, after they had forgotten my presence, demanded most of my attention.
Their attitude towards the teacher, a young man just out of college and amazingly conscientious and preserving, was that good-humored tolerance which has to take the place of enthusiastic interest in our American school. They seemed to like the teacher and recognize fully his good intentions, but their attitude was a delightful one of all making the best of a bad bargain, and co-operating loyally with him in slowly putting the hour out of its agony. This good-natured acceptance of the inevitable, this perfunctory going though by its devotees of the ritual of education, was my first striking impression, and the key to the reflections that I began to weave.
As I sank down to my seat I felt all that queer sense of depression, still familiar after ten years, that sensation, in coming into the schoolroom, of suddenly passing into a helpless, impersonal world, where expression could be achieved and curiosity asserted only in the most formal and difficult way. And the class began immediately to divide itself for me, as I looked around it, into the artificially depressed children like myself, commonly called the "good" children, and the artificially stimulated, commonly known as the "bad," and the envy and despair of every "good" child. For to these "bad" children, who are, of course, simply those with more self assertion and initiative than the rest, all the careful network of discipline and order is simply a direct and irresistible challenge. I remember the fearful awe with which I used to watch the exhaustless ingenuity of the "bad" boys of my class to disrupt the peacefully dragging recitation; and behold, I found myself watching intently, along with all the children in my immediate neighborhood, the patient activity of a boy who spent his entire hour in so completely sharpening a lead-pencil that there was nothing left at the end but the lead. Now what normal boy would do so silly a thing or who would look at him in real life? But here, in this artificial
