Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

Do you know anything that in all its innocence is more humiliating than the funny pages of a Sunday newspaper in America?

The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.

It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic.

The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.