Perhaps it is unnecessary to say that these things that I have been saying, or trying to say, about the flexibility and the potentiality of the human race in its present crisis, in its present struggle to maintain and add to its glory on the earth, are all beyond the range of possibility, and the present strength of manhood.  But I can only hope that these objections that people make will turn out like mine.  I have been making objections all my life, as all idealists must—­only to watch with dismay and joy the old-time, happy obdurate way objections have of going by.

People began by saying they would never use automobiles because they were so noisy and ill-odoured and ugly.  Presto!  The automobile becomes silent and shapes itself in lines of beauty.

Some of us had decided against balloons.  “Even if the balloon succeeds,” we said, “there will be no way of going just where and when you want to.”  And then, presto! regular channels of wind are discovered, and the balloon goes on.

“Aeroplanes,” we said, “may be successful, but the more successful they are, the more dangerous, and the more danger there will be of collisions—­collisions in the dark and up in the great sky at night.”  And, presto! man invents the wireless telegraph, and the entire sky can be full of whispers telling every airship where all the other airships are.

Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to do with monopoly.  Presto! there is suddenly evolved an entirely new type of monopolist—­the man who can be rich and good; the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that serves the owners, the producers and employees, the distributors and the consumers alike.  An American railway President has been saying lately that America would not have enough to eat in 2050, but it would not do to try to prove this just yet.  Some one, almost any day, will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York—­who knows?—­shall be carried around in one railway President’s vest pocket.

CHAPTER XII

NEW KINDS AND NEW SIZES OF MEN

It would be hard to overestimate the weariness and cynicism and despair that have been caused in the world by its more recklessly hopeful men—­the men who plump down happily anywhere and hope, the optimists who are merely slovenly in their minds about evil.  But the optimism that consists in putting evil facts up into a kind of outdoors in our minds and in giving them room to exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the optimism that consists in having one’s brain move vigorously through disagreeable facts—­organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work—­is worthy of consideration.  Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have noticed certain things.

When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of being rather clever.  It is forced upon one a little, of course, having all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not really seeing through them!