Their literature was all science, and that the science of the future. Romancing about the past or the present seemed to this utilitarian people waste of the noblest faculty of man, shameful squandering of imaginative wealth on that which is naught. Mere retrospection for its own sake without reference to subsequent advance was thought by them the most pernicious of madnesses; they diagnosed it as a kind of ethical blindness, that could neither see the right nor do it. The state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past with admiration was one of the lowest circles of their inferno; another was that of nations that saw nothing good outside of themselves and their immediate surroundings. In such unprogressive national or racial attitudes they saw all the evils of inbreeding; the weaknesses and intellectual and moral diseases of the past grew despotic in their power over the human system, till they came to seem the only virtues; even what had been once virtues grew inveterate and routine, or monstrous and overpowering in their excess. The past served only as the soil for the better growths of the future. And an exhausted soil became barren, if not poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that needed and deserved no attention or cultivation. To spend imagination on the past, therefore, was to them a crime against the future. What was dead and needed invention to bring before the mind again was better in its grave. A literature that turned back to the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, unless it belonged to a race that had fallen back centuries behind the natural advance of the world. For a progressive nation to give of its best for the resurrection of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism in it, and to prophesy its own rapid decay. The imagination was the faculty of the future; it had its eyes set in front, and not behind like memory; it was meant to investigate the horizon before us, and to interpret the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of vision, and not to look back, whether with regret or adoration, over the region that humanity had beaten hard with its weary footing. The future is infinite; the human past covers but a few centuries, and a narrow track through them. It is not for want of scope that the faculty of futurition is driven back on the ground already trodden; it is through a grievous and incurable malady, the malady of preterpluperfection, that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and rots or petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. They counted it the saddest of all spectacles on earth to see a race, that by its nature could be rapidly progressive, waste its highest energies in retracing again and again the footsteps of its own ancestry or of the ancestry of some other race. Nothing would persuade them to permit any study of the past that was not meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They tended to be, I thought, almost negligent of the value of history and