Of all this, the nineteenth century, in its exultant pride in its conquest of the invisible forces, was almost blind.  It not only accepted progress as an unmistakable fact—­mistaking, however, acceleration and facilitation for progress—­but in its mad folly believed in an immutable law of progress which, working with the blind forces of machinery, would propel man forward.

A few men, however, standing on the mountain ranges of human observation, saw the future more clearly than did the mass.  Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Max Nordau, in the nineteenth century, and, in our time, Ferrero, all pointed out the inevitable dangers of the excessive mechanization of human society.  The prophecies were unhappily as little heeded as those of Cassandra.

One can see the tragedy of the time, as a few saw it, in comparing the first Locksley Hall of Alfred Tennyson, written in 1827, with its abiding faith in the “increasing purpose of the ages” and its roseate prophecies of the golden age, when the “war-drum would throb no longer and the battle flags be furled in the Parliament of Man and the Federation of the World,” and the later Locksley Hall, written sixty years later, when the great spiritual poet of our time gave utterance to the dark pessimism which flooded his soul: 

  “Gone the cry of ‘Forward, Forward,’ lost within a growing gloom;
  Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

  Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,
  Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!

  Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
  And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

  Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
  City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?”

Am I unduly pessimistic?  I fear that this is the case with most men who, like Dante, have crossed their fiftieth year and find themselves in a “dark and sombre wood.”

My reader will probably subject me to the additional reproach that I suggest no remedy.

There are many palliatives for the evils which I have discussed.  To rekindle in men the love of work for work’s sake and the spirit of discipline, which the lost sense of human solidarity once inspired, would do much to solve the problem, for work is the greatest moral force in the world.  But I must frankly add that I have neither the time nor the qualifications to discuss the solution of this grave problem.

If we of this generation can only recognize that the evil exists, then the situation is not past remedy; for man has never yet found himself in a blind alley of negation.  He is still “master of his soul and captain of his fate,” and, to me, the most encouraging sign of the times is the persistent evidence of contemporary literature that thoughtful men now recognize that much of our boasted progress was as unreal as a rainbow.  While the temper of the times seems for the moment pessimistic, it merely marks the recognition of man of an abyss whose existence he barely suspected but over which his indomitable courage will yet carry him.