both forgot that
the men of that earlier period said the same--"not now, indeed,
but before us men were happy." So simpler men incline to say that
their grandfathers were fine fellows, but the "old college is going to
the dogs," or "the House of Commons is not what it was once," for
reverence and faith and manliness once ruled the world. The old
school lives upon an ignorance of history; it is genuinely moved by
a simple moral ideal of life and character which its own imagination
has created. And when evil becomes obvious, it is the new-fangled
notions that are to blame. "Trying new dodges" has brought
Athens down in the world--as Aristophanes in 393 B.C. makes his
protagonist say:

"And would it not have saved the Athenian state,
If she kept to what was good, and did not try
Always some new plan?"[1]

[Footnote 1: C. Delisle Burns: _Greek Ideals_, pp. 118-19.]

On a large scale the romantic idealization of the past has
been made into a philosophy of history. The "golden age,"
instead of being put in a roseate and remote future, is put in an
equally remote and roseate past. The Greek legends were
fond of a golden age when the gods moved among men. The
Garden of Eden is the Christian apotheosis of the world's
perfections. Various philosophers have pointed out the
fallacy of finding such a mythological locus for our ideals, and
evolution and the general revelations of history have indicated
the completely mythical character of the golden age. History
may, in general, be said to reveal that, whatever the
imperfections of our own age, we have immeasurably improved
in many pronounced respects over conditions earlier
than our own. The idealized picture of the Middle Ages with
its guardsmen and its courtly knights and ladies, is coming,
with increasing historical information, to seem insignificant
and untrue in comparison with the unspeakable hardships of
the mass of men, the evil social and sanitary conditions, the
plagues and pestilences which were as much a part of it. The
picture of the ideally gentle and benevolent attitude of the
master to his slaves is by no means regarded as a typical picture
of conditions of slave labor in the South. We know,
positively, on the other hand, that our medicine and surgery,
our scientific and industrial methods, our production and our
resources are incomparably greater than those of any earlier
period in history, as are the possibilities of the control of
Nature still unr