“ If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second. ”
And in heaven's name, who are the public enemies? exclaimed Dr. Leete. Are they France, England Germany or hunger, cold and nakedness?
~ Edward Bellamy
The effect of change in surroundings is like that of lapse of time in making the past seem remote.
As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of.
Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
