hrunken and rapidly shrinking planet, the
unpreparedness of existing ethics, law, philosophy, economics, politics
and government to meet the exigencies thus arising--Why?

Such I take to be the counsel of wisdom--the simple wisdom of sober common
sense. To ascertain the salient facts of our immense human past and then
to explain them in terms of their causes and conditions is not an easy
task. It is an exceedingly difficult one, requiring the labor of many men,
of many generations; but it must be performed; for it is only in
proportion as we learn to know the great facts of our human past and their
causes that we are enabled to understand our human present, for the
present is the child of the past; and it is only in proportion as we thus
learn to understand the present that we can face the future with
confidence and competence. Past, Present, Future--these can not be
understood singly and separately--they are welded together indissolubly as
_one_.

The period of humanity's childhood has been long--300,000 to 500,000 years,
according to the witness of human relics, ruins and records of the caves
and the rocks--a stretch of time too vast for our imaginations to grasp. Of
that immense succession of ages, except a minute fraction of it including
our own time, we have, properly speaking, no history; we have only a rude,
dim, broken outline. Herodotus, whom we call "the father of history"
proper, lived less than 2500 years ago. What is 2500 years compared with
the whole backward stretch of human time? We have to say that the father
of human history lived but yesterday--a virtual contemporary of those now
living. Our humankind groped upon this globe for probably 400,000 years
before the writing of what we call history had even begun. If we regard
history as a kind of _racial memory_, what must we say of our race's
memory? It is like that of a man of 20 years whose recollection extends
back less than 3 months or like that of a man of 60 years whose
recollection fails to reach any event of the first 59 years of his life.
Owing to the work of geologists, paleontologists, ethnologists and their
co-workers, the history of prehistoric man will grow, just as we know
to-day more about the life of mankind in the time of Herodotus than
Herodotus himself knew. Meanwhile we must try to make the best use of such
historical knowledge of man as we now possess.

Even if the story of humanity's childhood were fully recorded in the
libraries