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An ancient bear may fondly imagine that in his youth he did more glorious deeds than the enfeebled descendants he sees around him; but if he does think so, he cannot discourage them with his delusions. An ancient man could and did!

The education of the young is necessarily in the hands of their elders; and youth, with no knowledge or experience of its own, cannot conclusively deny, or even ably criticise, the statements made by the aged. This pride of the past, so manifest in the old, is not so injurious to-day. Recognised as a physical phenomenon, offset by wider knowledge of the facts, and with accessible records to give immutable proof that our environment has not shrunk in the least since we were young, this natural tendency of waning brain power does small harm. In our racial babyhood it did enormous harm. There was no record then to dispute with grandpa as to the number of wolves he had slain, or just how big were the nuts on the towering trees of his infancy.

So the Superior Past tradition was hammered hard into the unprotected infant brain, and took fast hold of it, wore deep furrows in it, set that habit of thought so rigidly in the mind of the race that it has taken all these unnumbered ages for a shouting universe to convince us that life is Growth! Only a few of us can see it even now. Deep down below our modern learning still may be found this basic assumption that things were better once—this recurring wish to go “back to nature,” or back to handicrafts, or back to something or another—so sure are we in our sub-soil minds that Heaven is behind us!