Читать книгу The industrial republic: a study of the America of ten years hence онлайн

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There were so many kinds of men—statesmen and business men, lawyers and clergymen, heroes and cowards; and I had to study them all, and see the thing through the eyes of each of them. And of course, I could only play at ignorance, for I knew the future; and I saw all their mistakes, and the reasons for them, and the pity and the folly and the tragedy of it all. Knowing, as I did, the great underlying forces which were driving behind the events, I saw all these people as puppets, moved here and there by powers of whose existence they never dreamed.

And, of course, all the while I was also reading my morning newspaper, and watching the world of to-day; and inevitably I found myself testing the people of the present by these same methods. I would find myself seeking for the forces which were at work to-day, and striving to reach out to the future to which they were leading. I would find myself, by the way of helping in this interpretation, comparing and balancing the two eras, and transposing its figures back and forth. This famous educator or this newspaper editor of to-day—what would he have been saying had he lived in 1852? And this clergyman friend of mine, this politician—where would he fit into that period? Or if Yancey had been alive to-day, what would he have been doing? Where should I have found Seward—what parts would Edward Everett and Wendell Phillips and Jefferson Davis have been playing?