filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect to-day,
and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that
will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which
will blot out all recollection. Change is not worth while unless it is
improvement. If I move out of my present house because I do not like it,
then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to
justify the change.

It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient
distinction,--between mere change and improvement. Yet there is a class of
mind that is prone to confuse them. We have had political leaders whose
conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something,--it
mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the
energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession. Now, life
does not consist of eternally running to a fire. There is no virtue in
going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there. The
direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going,
and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how
fast we were going or where we were going. I have my private belief that
we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those
things that in my boyhood days we called "treadmills,"--a treadmill being
a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule
was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even
other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of
noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out
some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.
Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends
tried dynamite. It moved,--in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.