Swearing has grown milder. The grossness and blasphemy are largely barred, while the expletives that technically may not be swearing at all, being used for raciness, vigor and emphasis, have increased one hundred fold.
A symptom of decadence is the elimination of book-stores. Speaking broadly it is impossible to find a stall with a stock of books except in the larger cities. When desirous of substantial reading matter I am sometimes able to buy biographies and other books, worth while, at the drug store in a country town. On moving into flats, families commit an unpardonable sin in disposing of their books. The most sickening sight in New York, Chicago, or Boston is to see second-hand books faded and weather-beaten exposed on the street for sale at a seedy, feeble price.
In spite of the strong drift of governments toward democracy, in revisiting the earth, I detected an exaggeration of class feeling as compared with the early days when there were no poor in the whole town and hardly any very rich. Our pleasures were then more simple and our life, on the whole, more serious.
The increased height in houses is apparent. As the family prospers, it seeks to have the walls in the second story carried up full height, that they may not show inside the pitch of the roof which is the distinguishing mark of a cottage.
The Unexpected Happens
I suppose that the passing years make little or no impression on a well-built stone wall, but where growth and prosperity abound they are not likely to preserve many of the primitive buildings and land-marks, but if any living man had predicted the entire remaking and reshaping of this place of my early residence the reply would have been that if the Lord would work a miracle then might this thing be. The man who professed to know just how we are made, as an automobile maker knows a car, tells us that in seven years we get, physically, a brand new outfit, that old things pass away, and all things become new. As we have not now the same bodies so we have not the same mind. Our ideals, our manners are different. We are different. We have had many a re-birth. Time has brought changes that could no more be withstood than you could resist the earth in its revolution. It is the miracle of a generation, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to many ears like a fable. The growth in population and in wealth, during a long constructive period, has kept up the clatter of the hammer, the cry of "mort," and the scent of the resinous odor of the pine. Inventions and improvements have placed man in a new relation to the globe he inhabits. Since new ideas began to prevail former methods have been discarded. Even a snake, with years, sheds its scales and envelopes itself in a new skin. The sun once stood still, and the Jordan was arrested in its banks, but life and the stream of events have flowed on without pause or rest. People who have never made a visit, like ours, will talk freely, far from wisely, about what they have always said, and always thought, as if they had always looked through the same eyes, and judged by the same standards. Not so. You looked on life as it seemed then and are looking again with the picture shifted. Your whole point of view is changed. When a man says, "I have always felt," he means that he has felt thus, back part way, or to a given point, but not so certainly much beyond it.
The Past Looks Like a Dream
We made from recollection and were aided by inquiry, a catalogue of the false prophets who early moved away, to the big cities, saying that the place where we had lived would never increase much in business or population. There is a French proverb which warns people not to use the words "never or always." The Wall Street Journal has just used that unreliable forbidden word "never." It heads an article, "Cheap Food Never Again." Any man living in our old place of residence would be wary of the use of the term "never." He would feel that almost any good fortune may come. With tractors and gang-plows operating in the Land of the Dakotas, South Dakota alone being a quarter larger than all New England, and Montana, the third largest state in the union, very much more than equal in size to England, Scotland, Ireland combined and Texas as big as Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland together, these states being now chiefly unfarmed, with shoals of immigrants after the war to work these fields, bounded only by the sky line, how can a man use the expression, Cheap Food Never Again? The statesman Cambon said that never would Rome cease to belong to the people and that never would Rome be the capital of the king of Italy. A Clergyman here, of high authority and position, showed how all the sovereigns of the chief European nations were blood relatives and announced that there could never be another great war. He became positive. He said such a thing was unthinkable. Look next at the harvest of death in the German war. "He who, outside of mathematics, pronounces the word 'impossible' lacks prudence."