If we had free thought, then we could collect the wealth of the intellectual world. In the physical world, springs make the creeks and brooks, and they the rivers, and the rivers empty into the great sea. So each brain should add to the sum of human knowledge. If we deny freedom of thought, the springs cease to gurgle, the rivers to run, and the great ocean of knowledge becomes a desert of barren, ignorant sand. ***** THIS IS AN AGE OF MONEY-GETTING, of materialism, of cold, unfeeling science. The question arises, Is the world growing less generous, less heroic, less chivalric? Let us answer this. The experience of the individual is much like the experience of a generation, or of a race. An old man imagines that everything was better when he was young; that the weather could then be depended on; that sudden changes are recent inventions. So he will tell you that people used to be honest; that the grocers gave full weight and the merchants full measure, and that the bank cashier did not spend the evening of his days in Canada. He will also tell you that the women were handsome and virtuous. There were no scandals then, no divorces, and that in religion all were orthodox--no Infidels. Before he gets through, he will probably tell you that the art of cooking has been lost--that nobody can make biscuit now, and that he never expects to eat another slice of good bread. He mistakes the twilight of his own life for the coming of the night of universal decay and death. He imagines that that has happened to the world, which has only happened to him. It does not occur to him that millions at the moment he is talking are undergoing the experience of his youth, and that when they become old they will praise the very days that he denounces. The Garden of Eden has always been behind us. The Golden Age, after all, is the memory of youth--it is the result of remembered pleasure in the midst of present pain. To old age youth is divine, and the morning of life cloudless. So now thousands and millions of people suppose that the age of true chivalry has gone by and that honesty has about concluded to leave the world. As a matter of fact, the age known as the age of chivalry was the age of tyranny, of arrogance and cowardice. Men clad in complete armor cut down the peasants that were covered with leather, and these soldiers of the chivalric age armored themselves to that degree that if they fell in battle they could not rise, held to the earth by the weight of iron that their bravery had got itself entrenched within. Compare the difference in courage between going to war in coats of mail against sword and spear, and charging a battery of Krupp guns!