Well, we have gotten you into a new year! Life and Fate and Time, all
have managed to get you here. With many of you they had a hard pull
to get you here. Some of you have been near to death; some of you so
miserable you hardly wanted to try another year here, and the majority
of you have shown the least interest about getting here. I don't
reproach you; you are only following the perverse example of Human
Nature. Did it ever strike you that the globe and the people who live
on its surface, are always marching different ways? While all the
restless tide of humanity moves to the West, the globe turns itself
to the East. On its surface, Man is much like the acrobat we see at
the theatres, who, mounted on his parti-colored ball, faces one way
while it moves the other. It must be a queer spectacle to those who,
from the planetary dress circle of the universe, are watching us through
their opera glasses. It must be still queerer to them when they hear
us chanting a Miserere at the approach of an invincible line across
the face of Time, as imaginary as the Equator, and when it is passed,
filling the air with a Jubilate--the songs of the dying and the coming
year. It is rather a comfort to us that we don't believe in the dress
circle of gazers; that we have the comfortable belief that we are the
only people in the Universe, and that beyond the questionable discovery
of a canal across one of the planets, the wisest of astronomers have
found no evidence of human life elsewhere. And so, with a Crusoe-like
sense of solitude, we live on our traditions, on our religions, and
on our ideas of Man to the exclusion of the rest of the Universe.

With an impartial judgment, therefore, and not influenced by the
approval or disapproval of this vast dress circle, in whose existence
we have no faith, let us take up these imaginary lines for a moment.