e
that we are out of court. All that we say may be true, but it is
irrelevant. 'True,' says the man of the Future, 'we have no religion,
literature, or art; we don't know whence we come, nor whither we go;
but, what is more important, we don't care. What we do know is, that
we are moving faster than any one ever moved before; and that there is
every chance of our moving faster and faster. To inquire "whither" is
the one thing that we recognize as blasphemous. The principle of the
Universe is Acceleration, and we are its exponents; what is not
accelerated will be extinguished; and if we cannot answer ultimate
questions, that is the less to be regretted in that, a few centuries
hence, there will be nobody left to ask them.'

"Such is the attitude which I believe to be that of the Future, both in
the West and in the East. I do not pretend to sympathize with it; but
my perception of it gives a peculiar piquancy to my own position. I
rejoice that I was born at the end of an epoch; that I stand as it were
at the summit, just before the plunge into the valley below; and
looking back, survey and summarize in a glance the ages that are past.
I rejoice that my friends are Socrates and Plato, Dante, Michelangelo,
Goethe instead of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Pierpont Morgan. I rejoice that
I belong to an effete country; and that I sit at table with almost the
last representatives of the culture, the learning and the ideals of
centuries of civilization. I prefer the tradition of the Past to that
of the Future; I value it the more for its contrast with that which is
to come; and I am the more at ease inasmuch as I feel myself divested
of all responsibility towards generations whose ideals and standards I
am unable to appreciate.

"All this shows, of course, merely that I am not one of the people so
aptly described by Wilson as the 'new generation.' But I flatter
myself that my intellectual apprehension is not coloured by the
circumstances of my own case, and that I have given you a clear and
objective picture of what it is that really constitutes progress. And
with that proud consciousness in my mind, I resume my seat."

THE conclusion of this speech was greeted with a hubbub of laughter,
approval, and protest confusedly mixed; in the midst of which it
occurred to me that I would select Audubon as the next speaker. My
reason was that Ellis, as I thought, under cover of an extravagant fit
of spleen, had made rather a formidab