How the Nineteenth century did belie all the prophecies of pessimism! And how the Twentieth century will belie all the prophecies of its pessimists! To realize this you must penetrate the dust and noise and clamor that are the surface of things. You must discard prejudice and that narrowness which makes you exaggerate the importance of the things immediately at hand--the things that are mere details of the great pattern which time is weaving in the loom of history--details incomprehensible unless you look at the pattern as a whole. Disregard tradition and egotism; free yourself of the small silliness that leads you to confuse intelligence with etiquette and clothes, with formal education which may or may not affect the intellect. Look deep into the realities and see there the lines of the Common Man--the toiler at the desk and bench and lever and plow, his mind bent upon his work, his work the improvement of his own condition and the handing down of the heritage of life richer and better in every way than he received it. Through the ages this Common Man has been building like the coral insect--silently, secretly, steadily, strongly. History has little to say about him or his work, and that little misleading; the historians have been unable to get away from courts and battlefields and the legislation halls where fierce but futile and evanescent class struggles rage. But the real story of the past of the human race as an interpreter and prophet of the future is the story of the building of the coral continent founded broadly and deeply upon freedom and justice, upon Intelligence and Democracy. And now at last this continent of enduring civilization begins to emerge not here and there, not merely above the ebbtides of ignorance and tyranny, but everywhere and for all time. Let us read the past aright. Its departed civilizations are not a gloomy warning, but a bright promise. If limited intelligence in a small class produced such gleams of glory in the black sky of history, what a day must be now dawning! THE END TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.