It is a mere superstition, Maeterlinck tells us in one of his beautiful essays, that there is anything irrevocable about the past. On the contrary, we are constantly rearranging it, revising it, remaking it. For it is only in our memory that it exists, and our conception of it changes as the loose fringes of past events are gathered up into a new meaning, or when a sudden fortune lights up a whole series in our lives, and shows us, stretching back in orderly array and beautiful significance, what we had supposed in our blindness to be a sad and chaotic welter. It is no less a superstition to suppose that we have a hand in making the present. The present, like the past, is always still to be made; indeed, must wait its turn, so to speak, to be seen in its full meaning until after the past itself has been remoulded and reconstituted. It is depressing to think that we do not know our own time, that the events we look upon have a permanent value far different from the petty one that we endow them with, that they fit into a larger whole of which we see only a dim fraction--and that the least important because the seed of something that shall come much later into full fruition. Must our short life pass away without knowledge or vision of the majestic processes which are unfolding themselves under our very eyes, while we have wasted our admiration and distorted our purpose by striving to interpret the ephemeral, that is gone as soon as we? Even the wisest among us can see with but a dim eye into the future, and make rather a lucky guess at its potentialities than a true prophecy based on a realization of the real tendencies of the time. It is only the Past that we really make. And this may account for our love of it. This fragile thing of tradition that we have so carefully constructed and so lovingly beautified, this artistic creation of a whole people or race, becomes most naturally the object of our tenderest solicitude. Any attack upon it that suggests a marring of its golden beauty, any new proposal that threatens to render it superfluous, elicits the outraged cry of anger, the passionate defense, of the mother protecting her child. For the Past is really the child of the Present. We are the authors of its being, and upon it we lavish all our thoughts, our interest and our delight. And even our hopes are centred in the Past, for the most enthusiastic among us can do no more than hope that something worth while will come out of the Past to nourish us in the approaching Present. Concern for the Future is so new a thing in human history that we are hardly yet at home with the feeling. Perhaps, if we thought more about what was before us, we should come to know more about it. Meanwhile our only consolation is that if _we_ cannot see, neither did the generations that were before us. And we have the advantage of _knowing_ that we do not see, while they did not care about their ignorance at all.