servative of all. Never was the past more venerated by men than
it was by the French Revolutionists. They invoked the little republics
of antiquity with the complete confidence of one who invokes the gods.
The Sans-culottes believed (as their name might imply) in a return to
simplicity. They believed most piously in a remote past; some might call
it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant
his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead.
Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face
turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as
he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future
itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, which some
call Nirvana. To-morrow is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mirrored
in the shining shield of yesterday. If he sees it directly he is turned
to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate
and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect
creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological
scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The
only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists
somewhat amusing, statues.

But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies
and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless
future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and
sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy
to a restless and rather morbid generation; and they maintain a strange
silence about them--sometimes amounting to an unscrupulous silence. They
keep them entirely out of their newspapers and almost entirely out of
their history books. For example, they will often tell you (in their
praises of the coming age) that we are moving on towards a United States
of Europe. But they carefully omit to tell you that we are moving away
from a United States of Europe, that such a thing existed literally
in Roman and essentially in mediaeval times. They never admit that the
international hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really very recent,
the mere breakdown of the ideal of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they
will tell you that there is going to be a social revolution, a great
rising of the poor against the rich; but they never rub it in that
France made that magnificent at