y years ago. The real world, and all the men in
it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in
precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution
way. The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more
effective and practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping
their heads on than it is by taking their heads off--some of us seem to
have passed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with our new
explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new
storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing
everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old
lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now
on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy,
emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year
by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become
scientific, and see things as they are--has gone by. We have not time
for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not
practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution
all together, suit us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing
men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of
thought--by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making
ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see
them as they are. The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded,
implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by
merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just
showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.

There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are
particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded,
romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real
adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth
century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of
seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with
good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The
way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to
look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the
enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with cooeperation, with
understanding him and being understood by him, by being imp