[Illustration] [Illustration] III A CENTURY’S RUN [Illustration] We are a very young nation, yet we have a past. In popular acceptance we have little to live down, which should be a comfort. Just at present there is a tendency to be disrespectful toward the past, to smile at ancestral pretension, to humanize the Fathers of the Republic, to sneer at the straw and bones on the floor of King Arthur’s dining hall, to uncover the littleness of the ancient giants, to question the beauty of the ancient heroines. Probably this needed to be done, particularly in defence of the abused Present, which always hitherto has had a hard time of it. “Every age since the golden,” says George Eliot, “may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to the vulgar and sordid elements, of which there are always an abundance, even in Greece and Italy, the favorite realms of the respective optimists.” The author of “Romola” was willing not to have lived sooner, and to possess even Athenian life “solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity.” But even the past, sinfully boastful and complacent as it appears, has rights which we must make some show of respecting, and we need not too effusively applaud the present. Possibly the one good excuse for finding out and confessing the whole truth about the past, is the need to show, at whatever cost, that neither all of our vices nor all of our virtues are entirely new. The passion for discovery is so strong that some one always is ready to prove that the most trite and fundamental of traits are absolutely novel, and the same passion appears in the unction with which the pretension is ridiculed and overthrown. I talked one day with a distinguished American historian, who confessed that the supreme difficulty for the commentator on human character and events was that arising from a tendency to “think disproportionately well of facts which he himself has discovered.” Admit this to be a human trait and we have a sufficient explanation of the ardor of the discoverer.