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Show PROPHECY AND ACCOMPLISHMENT. The high civilization of ancient peoples is often of-ten brought forward by modern writers and in the odiou3 soil of comparison the attempt is made to belittle the accomplishments of the twentieth century. cen-tury. Assertions are frequently met with that in the arts and in the simple virtues of the ancients there is more to be admired than in all the glorious triumphs of today. These sentiment3 may be only a harking back to the "good old days" in which gray heads live their declining years; or it may be that the veil which shrouds in all but oblivion the amiable dispositions of extinct races and which when pierced allows light to fall only upon their virtues, leads the poetic mind to marvel at this lost perfection. But the ancients did not have any automobiles . i or telegraphs, telephones or railroads, and their knowledge of the sciences was no more than enough to make their wise men prophets and dreamers. With all our profound respect for the glories of the ancient civilizations, we are still most deeply-grateful deeply-grateful for having been born to live in the more strenuous, if less beautiful, years of the twentieth century. Xow we do things of which the ancients dreamed. If our civilization is not so refined, our mechanical progress has some compensation for the loss, and the ancient perfection furnishes U3 a worthy ideal toward which to strive. Xowadays we look back over the progress in mechanical things and compare what is and what was. It is nly a hundred years since Robert Fulton Ful-ton was laughed at for his crazy notions regarding steam navigation, yet today the Lusitania is the ideal which navigators and ship builders are striving striv-ing to improve. The fact that Fulton was laughed at, and Daguerre landed in an insane asylum, and Dr. Jenner lost his social position and medical practice, all for holding advanced views in the world of science and invention, is evidence that the people of their day were not prepared to follow their leaders and superiors. They applied their knowledge, whereas the wise men of ancient time? i speculated on hypotheses which never have been and never will be solved. Morse, Bell, Edison, Marconi. Pasteur, Burbank, Roentgen and others have done more for the world, have quickened the thought of more people and have accomplished more practical good in the world than all the ancient civilizations in their palmiest days ever dreamed. These men have worked out so many ideas and demonstrated so many truths of different kinds that the people now. accept and believe almost any wild fancy which may be told them. From incredulity twenty years ago the masses have gone to the extreme of credulity, and in the realms of science and invention inven-tion they imagine their most absurd dreams may be accomplished. Prophesying as to the thing-! which soon are to be done, and a vivid imagination guiding the prophecies, the people who do n r ; know anything of the limitations of the hum3;i f mind spur on the inventors to greater and greater effort. Whether credit will ever be given to the t originators of a new idea which may be turned into practical use by some one else i$ a question most difficult to answer. How much the inventor may owe to the prophets in the goad they may furnish fur-nish to do more and better things no one can tell. But there is an intimate connection between prophecy and accomplishment, and the one consigned con-signed to oblivion as a false prophet in this amiable amia-ble age may furnish an idea which will not see fruition until the twentieth century is but a memory. mem-ory. The pure intellectuality and love of the beautiful beau-tiful which are the reputed characteristics of ancient an-cient nations may again return to earth, but not until science and invention have run their course and there i3 nothing more to discover, nothing more to invent, and the world settles down to a hum-drum existence wherein poets can inspire no more the minds of men bent on accomplishing what never was before. And that day is not yet I upon us. |