"Life is
so gay and horrid!" Hay still felt the humor, though more and
more rarely, but what he felt most was the enormous complexity
and friction of the vast mass he was trying to guide. He bitterly
complained that it had made him a bore -- of all things the most
senatorial, and to him the most obnoxious. The old friend was
lost, and only the teacher remained, driven to madness by the
complexities and multiplicities of his new world.
To one who, at past sixty years old, is still passionately
seeking education, these small, or large, annoyances had no great
value except as measures of mass and motion. For him the
practical interest and the practical man were such as looked
forward to the next election, or perhaps, in corporations, five
or ten years. Scarcely half-a-dozen men in America could be named
who were known to have looked a dozen years ahead; while any
historian who means to keep his alignment with past and future
must cover a horizon of two generations at least. If he seeks to
align himself with the future, he must assume a condition of some
sort for a world fifty years beyond his own. Every historian --
sometimes unconsciously, but always inevitably -- must have put
to himself the question: How long could such-or-such an outworn
system last? He can never give himself less than one generation
to show the full effects of a changed condition.
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