Now, movement has no virtue in itself.  Change is not worth while for its own sake.  I am not one of those who love variety for its own sake.  If a thing is good to-day, I should like to have it stay that way to-morrow.  Most of our calculations in life are dependent upon things staying the way they are.  For example, if, when you got up this morning, you had forgotten how to dress, if you had forgotten all about those ordinary things which you do almost automatically, which you can almost do half awake, you would have to find out what you did yesterday.  I am told by the psychologists that if I did not remember who I was yesterday, I should not know who I am to-day, and that, therefore, my very identity depends upon my being able to tally to-day with yesterday.  If they do not tally, then I am confused; I do not know who I am, and I have to go around and ask somebody to tell me my name and where I came from.

I am not one of those who wish to break connection with the past; I am not one of those who wish to change for the mere sake of variety.  The only men who do that are the men who want to forget something, the men who filled yesterday with something they would rather not recollect to-day, and so go about seeking diversion, seeking abstraction in something that will blot out recollection, or seeking to put something into them which will blot out all recollection.  Change is not worth while unless it is improvement.  If I move out of my present house because I do not like it, then I have got to choose a better house, or build a better house, to justify the change.

It would seem a waste of time to point out that ancient distinction,—­between mere change and improvement.  Yet there is a class of mind that is prone to confuse them.  We have had political leaders whose conception of greatness was to be forever frantically doing something,—­it mattered little what; restless, vociferous men, without sense of the energy of concentration, knowing only the energy of succession.  Now, life does not consist of eternally running to a fire.  There is no virtue in going anywhere unless you will gain something by being there.  The direction is just as important as the impetus of motion.

All progress depends on how fast you are going, and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going.  I have my private belief that we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those things that in my boyhood days we called “treadmills,”—­a treadmill being a moving platform, with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere.  Elephants and even other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of noise, and causing certain wheels to go round, and I daresay grinding out some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress.  Lately, in an effort to persuade the elephant to move, really, his friends tried dynamite.  It moved,—­in separate and scattered parts, but it moved.