And this “security” is exceedingly strengthened by the inability of the majority of mankind to picture any life but the life that they have always known. The defiance of the future by the present--the insistence of hard, tangible things against a kingdom of dreams and speculations--is a defiance too often forgotten by those who are impatient of the slow processes of change. They see evil to be overcome, visions of clearer horizons and a fairer dawn. They cannot understand why mankind round them--equally intelligent, equally pitiful--do not find their feet marching to the same militant melody. They fail to apprehend rightly the crushing effect of the present, especially as embodied in solid, material realities, upon the minds of the majority. To these, history is but a misty panorama of uncertain meaning, geography a story of things wonderful and strange, but remote and negligible. Here is the real world: the houses of commerce, four-square, of stone, ample Government offices, law courts, police stations, secure private dwellings. “Let him change it who can,” their innermost souls declare, in a declaration which actually signifies, “It never will be changed at all.” By the many, of all classes, the affirmation of the Psalmist would be readily re-echoed,--“He has held the round world so fast, that it cannot be moved at any time.” Inhabitants of the earthquake zones are always convinced that each successive tremor will be the last tremor, that now, at length, the old earth, after a final shaking, has settled down to sleep. And the same is true of the shaking of the children of earth--the call, sounding to the nations in succeeding centuries, which has shattered custom, convention, security, and all the accepted ways. Each revolution is always the last revolution, the final effort of a violence which has expired in this ultimate convulsion. Now, at last, and after all the centuries, mankind is to be allowed to “settle down” in reasonable comfort to accept and to enjoy.