he future--Joubert--Saint-Marc
Girardin--Solved and unsolved problems--The introduction of a new
element--Inapplicability of past experience--An argument against
Republics--The lessons of history--Mistaken predictions that have been
based on them--Morality and ecclesiastical authority--Compatibility of
hopes for the future with gratitude to the past--That we are more
respectful to the past than previous ages have been--Our feelings
towards tradition--An incident at Warsaw--The reconstruction of the
navy.

The astonishing revolution in thought and practice which is taking place
amongst the intelligent Japanese, the throwing away of a traditional
system of living in order to establish in its stead a system which, for
an Asiatic people, is nothing more than a vast experiment, has its
counterpart in many an individual life in Europe. We are like travellers
crossing an isthmus between two seas, who have left one ship behind
them, who have not yet seen the vessel that waits on the distant shore,
and who experience to the full all the discomforts and inconveniences of
the passage from one sea to the other. There is a break between the
existence of our forefathers and that of our posterity, and it is we who
have the misfortune to be situated exactly where the break occurs. We
are leaving behind us the security, I do not say the safety, but the
feeling of tranquillity which belonged to the ages of tradition; we are
entering upon ages whose spirit we foresee but dimly, whose institutions
are the subject of guesses and conjectures. And yet this future, of
which we know so little, attracts us more by the very vastness of its
enigma than the rich history of the past, so full of various incident,
of powerful personages, of grandeur, and suffering, and sorrow. Joubert
already noticed this forward-looking of the modern mind. "The ancients,"
he observed, "said, 'Our ancestors;' we say, 'Posterity.' We do not love
as they did _la patrie_, the country and laws of our forefathers; we
love rather the laws and the country of our children. It is the magic of
the future, and not that of the past, which seduces us." Commenting on
this thought of Joubert's, Saint-Marc Girardin said that we loved the
future because we loved ourselves, and fashioned the future in our own
image; and he added, with partial but not complete injustice, that our
ignorance of the past was a cause of this tendency in our minds, since
it is shorter to desp