A cynical but witty Englishman said, in a book, not long ago, that it was
a mistake to say of a conspicuously successful man, eminent in his line of
business, that you could not bribe a man like that, because, he said, the
point about such men is that they have been bribed--not in the ordinary
meaning of that word, not in any gross, corrupt sense, but they have
achieved their great success by means of the existing order of things and
therefore they have been put under bonds to see that that existing order
of things is not changed; they are bribed to maintain the _status quo_.

It was for that reason that I used to say, when I had to do with the
administration of an educational institution, that I should like to make
the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as
possible. Not because their fathers lacked character or intelligence or
knowledge or patriotism, but because their fathers, by reason of their
advancing years and their established position in society, had lost touch
with the processes of life; they had forgotten what it was to begin; they
had forgotten what it was to rise; they had forgotten what it was to be
dominated by the circumstances of their life on their way up from the
bottom to the top, and, therefore, they were out of sympathy with the
creative, formative and progressive forces of society.

Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word
comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the
thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men
through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They
thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were
tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the
larger spear. "There were giants in those days." Now all that has altered.
We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in