ABSTRACT
It is quite unlikely that twentieth-century England will produce another Macaulay. Not that romance is dead; not that there is an end of heroic personalities. Is there no strife of ambitions, of interests, of wills, of ideals ? As men progress in freedom, they fight more, not less ardently, because they have more real things to fight for, and the publicity of modern life creates a world-arena in which the excitement never ceases. The soldier and the arbitrary statesman have, indeed, lost their preeminence; but the combat whose weapons are credit papers, and laboratory tricks, and mechanical improvements evokes an energy and an interest impossible to attribute to any ancient quarrel over a royal marriage or succession. The author of the American Steel Trust is as prodigious a being as Hannibal or Napoleon, and shows himself of the same breed not least by talking peace in his latter days. The old forms of savagery decay; yet Cobden and his Manchester friends brought “not peace but a sword” into millions of humble homes. Most of the earth was roughly explored a century ago. The next task was to exploit its elementary goods, to feed the swarming millions of its children, to bring the fruits of the East to the West, to dig the soil everywhere, and set up new markets humming with polyglot demand. This proved no less exciting, though in different ways. So, where Fenimore Cooper's pioneers broke the solitude, the wild cries of the Chicago wheat-pit now resound. The robber barons of the Rhineland who took toll of the merchants' caravan are represented by Imperial customs officials, multi-titular and resplendent, administering a “scientific tariff.” Scholars are taught to scoff at the South Sea Bubble; they grow up to look with other eyes upon a gamble in “futures,” or a “flutter” in oil or rubber. Every piece of food we eat, everything we wear, every tool we use, is full of the romance of this transformation of the world's business. Cotton, paper, steel, soda, wool, guano, gunpowder, sugar, wheat, rubber—the expert has done his best to vulgarize them; yet there is not one of these common things but could tell a tale of adventure that would outshine the best of the old fairy stories.
