The Old Gentleman's Opinions


I had occasion about a fortnight ago to meet a man more nearly ninety
than eighty years of age, who had had special opportunity for
discovering the changes of Europe during his long life. He was of the
English wealthier classes by lineage, but his mother had been of the
French nobility and a Huguenot. His father had been prominent in the
diplomacy of a couple of generations ago. He had travelled widely, read
perhaps less widely, but had known and appreciated an astonishing number
of his contemporaries.

I was interested (without any power of my own to judge whether his
decisions were right or wrong) to discover what most struck him in the
changes produced by that great stretch of years, all of which he had
personally observed: he was born just after Waterloo, and he could
remember the Reform Bill.

He surprised me by telling me, in the first place, that the material
changes and discoveries, enormous though they were in extent, were not,
in his view, the most striking. He was ready to leave it open whether
these material changes were the causes of moral changes more remarkable,
or merely effects concomitant with these. When I asked him what had
struck him most of the great material developments, he told me the
phonograph and the aeroplane among inventions; Mendel's observations in
the sphere of experimental knowledge; and, in the sphere of pure theory,
the breakdown of many things that had been dogmas of physical science in
his early manhood.