The Career of Leonard Wood

by Joseph Hamblen Sears

Roughly speaking since Wood was born intercourse between persons by means of conversation has become so perfected that it is now possible for {260} two people, one in New York and the other in San Francisco, to converse over the telephone--wireless or otherwise--as easily as could two persons when Wood was born talk from one room to another through an open doorway. So that for practical purposes the three or four thousand mile breadth of this continent is reduced to what then was a matter of ten feet.

One might continue indefinitely, but these two examples are sufficient. If San Francisco is no further away than the next room and if London can be reached as quickly as New London, and if myriads of other physical changes of this sort have occurred in sixty years, then it is fair to assume that there has been an equal amount of resulting psychological change. These changes in the relation of man to his surroundings and the consequent changes in his relations to himself and his fellow beings have probably done more to rearrange the world on a different basis than all the developments of the half-dozen centuries that preceded the nineteenth.

The elimination of distance, the making of human relation as easy for continents as for {261} adjoining communities lessens the size of the world and standardizes the rules that govern life. All intellectual, political, commercial and military procedures have changed therefore in the last half century to a greater extent than in hundreds of years prior thereto. One race in the fifth or sixth grade of civilization begins to discover what the other race in the first grade is doing. One commercial country of a lower order finds what it is losing because of another country of a higher order of commercialism. The laborers of Barcelona discover what the laborers of New York are receiving in compensation for the same work. The people of Russia discover the different political conditions existing amongst themselves and the people of England and France. The government of the German Empire sees what a united nation backed by the biggest army on earth might do in Europe. The men of Austria who have no vote learn what the men of the United States procure from universal suffrage.

With the belief on every human being's part that the other fellow is better off than he, with the education which goes on through the medium {262} of emigration and immigration, with the immense number of detail short cuts, with the prodigious increase in reading and the resulting acquirement of the ideas of others, with the myriad of other matters patent to any one who thinks--with all this and because of it the methods and procedure of daily life have changed entirely throughout most of the civilized world since a man who is now nearly sixty was born.

At the same time the family remains the same; the marriage law is unchanged; the right of private property is what it was in the days of ancient Rome. The Constitution of the United States is what it was a hundred and thirty years ago. Justice is the same as it was in the time of Alexander. The Golden Rule has not been altered since the time of Christ. Love, hate, fear and courage stand as they were originally some time prior to the stone age.

To revert, then, to the simile of the construction of the house, it seems true that while the plaster and the wall paper--the decorations of its interior and exterior--change from time to nevertheless on the whole, as a rule, in the main {263} the passage of the great ages has not materially changed the supports of the structure--and never will.

In the matter of interior and exterior decoration periods come and go during which those who build houses decorate according to schools of art. It is the only belief that any sane and hopeful human being can have that these schools of decoration for the old house of civilization in the main steadily improve. If it is not so, then we have nothing to live for, nothing to which we may look forward. Also, however, there are fashions and fads running along by the side of these great schools which are suggestive, amusing or ludicrous, as the case may be. The cubists and the followers of the old masters paint at the same time. One, however, dies shortly and the other lives on--often to be sure affected in some slight way by the grotesque but honest fad, but never giving way to it.

In the month of November, 1918, greater changes of this nature took place in the political world than in all the years which preceded that month since the beginning of the Christian era. {264} In that month some scores of crowned heads stepped down from their thrones and made haste to reach shelter as do the rats in a kitchen when the cook turns on the electric light. At that time something like three hundred millions of people gave up their particular forms of government and to a certain extent have been living on since without any substitute.

Some of these crowned heads have sat on their thrones from five to ten centuries. Some of the governments have lived as long.

It looks like a general tumble of the house of civilization. And yet most of these millions of people go on getting up in the morning, going to bed at night and, impossible as it may seem, conducting commercial enterprises. The kings have gone; the governments have gone; yet the people remain and their daily life goes on--not as usual --but in the main the same.