But the wisest
will tell them that, save blindly and upon authority, the young cannot
take it. For most of human and social experience is words to the young,
and the reality can come only with years. The wise complain of the jingo
in every country; and properly, for he upsets the plans of statesmen,
miscalculates the value of national forces, and may, if he is powerful
enough, destroy the true spirit of armies. But the wise would be wiser
still if, while they blamed the extravagance of this sort of man, they
would recognize that it came from that half-knowledge of mere names and
lists which excludes reality. It is maps and newspapers that turn an
honest fool into a jingo.
It is so again with distance, and it is so with time. Men will not grasp
distance unless they have traversed it, or unless it be represented to
them vividly by the comparison of great landscapes. Men will not grasp
historical time unless the historian shall be at the pains to give them
what historians so rarely give, the measure of a period in terms of a
human life. It is from secondary impressions divorced from reality that
a contempt for the past arises, and that the fatal illusion of some
gradual process of betterment of "progress" vulgarizes the minds of men
and wastes their effort. It is from secondary impressions divorced from
reality that a society imagines itself diseased when it is healthy, or
healthy when it is diseased.
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