One of the many burdens that drag on the soul is a knowledge of the past. It is a strong man who can know history and keep his courage; a great dream that can face the fact and live. We look at those flitting experiments called civilizations: we see them rise one after another, we see them produce and produce and produce, we feel the weight of their accumulating wealth; still visionable to us the busyness of geniuses and slaves piling stone upon stone and making pyramids to greet the stars, still audible the voices of Socrates in the agora and of old Plato passing quietly among the students in the grove, still haunting us the white faces of martyrs in the amphitheatres of Rome: and then the pyramids stand bare and lonely, the voices of Greek genius are hushed, the Colosseum is a ruin and a memory; one after another these peoples pass, these wonderful peoples, greater perhaps, wiser and nobler perhaps, than the peoples of our time; and we almost choke with the heavy sense of a vast futility encompassing the world. Some of us turn away then from the din of effort, and seek in resignation the comfort of a living death; some others find in the doubt and difficulty the zest and reward of the work. After all, the past is not dead, it has not failed; only the vileness of it is dead, gone with the winnowing of time; that which was great and worthy lives and works and is real. Plato speaks to us still, speaks to millions and millions of us; and the blood of martyrs is the seed of saints. We speak and pass, but the word remains. Effort is not lost. Not to have tried is the only failure, the only misery; all effort is happiness, all effort is success. And so again we write ourselves in books and stone and color, and smile in the face of time; again we hear the call of the work, that it be done: Edens that wait the wizardry of thought, Beauty that craves the touch of artist hands, Truth that but hungers to be felt or seen; and again we are hot with the passion for perfection. We will remake. We will wonder and desire and dream and plan and try. We are such beings as dream and plan and try; and the glory of our defeats dims the splendor of the sun. We will take thought and add a cubit to our stature; we will bring intelligence to the test and call it together from all corners of the earth; we will harness the genius of the race and renew creation. We will remake. Printed in the United States of America. * * * * * The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. Poverty and Social Progress BY MAURICE PARMELEE, PH.D. _Cloth, crown 8vo, 477 pp., $1.90_ “Suitable for college classes as well as for the general reader, and contains a great mass of material of value to the citizen who really wants to know.”--_Independent._ “A very competent presentation of the various social factors that go to make up the problem of poverty.”--_Churchman._