The Call of the Twentieth Century | Page 2

years to do them in, and two of these years are gone already. We must be up and bestir ourselves. If we are called to help in this work, there is no time for an idle minute. Idle men and idle women no doubt will cumber our way, for there are many who have never heard of the work to do, many who will never know that there has been a new century. These the century will pass by with the gentle tolerance she shows to clams and squirrels, but on those of us she calls to her service she will lay heavy burdens of duty. "The color of life is red." Already the fad of the drooping spirit, the end-of-the-century pose, has given way to the rush of the strenuous life, to the feeling that struggle brings its own reward. The men who are doing ask no favor at the end. Life is repaid by the joy of living it.
As the century is strenuous so will it be complex. The applications of science have made the great world small, while every part of it has grown insistent. As the earth has shrunk to come within our grasp, so has our own world expanded to receive it. "My mind to me a kingdom is," and to this kingdom all the other kingdoms of the earth now send their embassadors. The complexity of life is shown by the extension of the necessity of choice. Each of us has to render a decision, to say yes or no a hundred times when our grandfathers were called upon a single time. We must say yes or no to our neighbors' theories or plans or desires, and whoever has lived or lives or may yet live in any land or on any island of the sea has become our neighbor. Through modern civilization we are coming into our inheritance, and this heirloom includes the best that any man has done or thought since history and literature and art began. It includes, too, all the arts and inventions by which any men of any time have separated truth from error. Of one blood are all the people of the earth, and whatsoever is done to the least of these little ones in some degree comes to me. We suffer from the miasma of the Indian jungles; we starve with the savages of the harvestless islands; we grow weak with the abused peasants of the Russian steppes, who leave us the legacy of their grippe. The great volcano which buries far off cities at its foot casts its pitying dust over us. It is said that through the bonds of commerce, common trade, and common need, there is growing up the fund of a great "bank of human kindness," no genuine draft on which is ever left dishonored. Whoever is in need of help the world over, by that token has a claim on us.
In our material life we draw our resources from every land. Clothing, spices, fruits, toys, household furniture,--we lay contributions on the whole world for the most frugal meal, for the humblest dwelling. We need the best work of every nation and every nation asks our best of us. The day of home-brewed ale, of home-made bread, and home-spun clothing is already past with us. Better than we can do, our neighbors send us, and we must send our own best in return. With home-made garments also pass away inherited politics and hereditary religion, with all the support of caste and with all its barriers. We must work all this out for ourselves; we must make our own place in society; we must frame our own creeds; we must live our own religion; for no longer can one man's religion be taken unquestionably by any other. As the world has been unified, so is the individual unit exalted. With all this, the simplicity of life is passing away. Our front doors are wide open as the trains go by. The caravan traverses our front yard. We speak to millions, millions speak to us; and we must cultivate the social tact, the gentleness, the adroitness, the firmness necessary to carry out our own designs without thwarting those of others. Time no longer flows on evenly. We must count our moments, so much for ourselves, so much for the world we serve and which serves us in return. We must be swift and accurate in the part we play in a drama so mighty, so strenuous, and so complex.
More than any of the others, the Twentieth Century will be democratic. The greatest discovery of the Nineteenth Century was that of the reality of external things. That of the Twentieth Century will be this axiom in social geometry: "A straight line is the shortest distance between