"Oh, yes—and some men continued to drink. I told you there was liquor to be had—good liquor, too. And other drug habits held on for a while. But we stopped the source of the trouble. The old men died off, the younger ones got over it, and the new ones—that's what you don't realize yet: We make a new kind of people now."
He was silent, his strong mouth set in a kind smile, his eyes looking far up the blue river.
"Well, what comes next? What's done it?" I demanded. "Religion, education, or those everlasting women?"
He laughed outright; laughed till the boat rocked.
"How you do hate to admit that it's their turn. John! Haven't we had full swing—everything in our hands—for all historic time? They have only begun. Thirty years? Why, John, they have done so much in these thirty years that the world's heart is glad at last. You don't know——"
I didn't know. But I did feel a distinct resentment at being treated like an extinct species.
"They have simply stepped on to an eminence men have been all these years building," I said. "We have done all the hard work—are doing it yet, for all I see. We have made it possible for them to live at all! We have made the whole civilization of the world—they just profit by it. And now you speak as if, somehow, they had managed to achieve more than we have!"
Owen considered a while thoughtfully. "What you say is true. We have done a good deal of the work; we did largely make and modify our civilization. But if you read some of the newer histories——" he stopped and looked at me as if I had just happened. "Why you don't know yet, do you? History has been rewritten."
"You speak as if 'history' was a one act play."
"I don't mean it's all done, of course—but we do have now a complete new treatment of the world's history. Each nation its own, some several of them, there's no dead level of agreement, I assure you. But our old androcentric version of life began to be questioned about 1910, I think—and new versions appeared, more and more of them. The big scholars took it up, there was new research work, and now we are not so glib in our assurance that we did it all."