opments of the half-dozen
centuries that preceded the nineteenth.

The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for
continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the
world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual,
political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore
in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years
prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization
begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing.
One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing
because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The
laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are
receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia
discover the different political conditions existing amongst
themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the
German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on
earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn
what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage.

With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is
better off than he, with the education which goes on through the
medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of
detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the
resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other
matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it
the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely
throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly
sixty was born.

At the same time the family remains the same; the marriage law is
unchanged; the right of private property is what it was in the days of
ancient Rome. The Constitution of the United States is what it was a
hundred and thirty years ago. Justice is the same as it was in the
time of Alexander. The Golden Rule has not been altered since the time
of Christ. Love, hate, fear and courage stand as they were originally
some time prior to the stone age.

To revert, then, to the simile of the construction of the house, it
seems true that while the plaster and the wall paper--the decorations
of its interior and exterior--change from time to nevertheless on the
whole, as a rule, in the main {263} the passage of the great ages has
not materially cha