Excerpt from Some Constructive Aspects of the War

China bestirred herself to play in time a conspicuous part in the international drama.

With this growing expansion went tremendous victories of man over the obstacles of space and time. Both ceased to be serious drawbacks in the conduct of affairs either in business or diploracy. S0 rapid indeed was the progress of mechanical in ventions that the conditions of a past decade seemed almost as antiquated as those of a past century. The effect of such progress along every line of human endeavor was almost start ling. The mind became used to magnitudes and sensations. Man thought in millions where formerly he had thought in thou sands, he saw almost no limit to human capacity, where formerly there had been fixed metes and bounds to human control over the forces of nature, he learned of new operations in medicine and surgery with the same unconcern as he greeted wireless telegraphy, color photography, the ¿ying machine, and the dis covery of the North Pole. He followed the lead of the micro scope to the haunt of the latest bacillus and of the telescope to that of the remotest fixed star. He endeavored to understand the latest returns from the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology, and though he knew little, in truth, of the technique of these things, he could comprehend their bearing and importance and their relations to the problems of human life and its eu vironment. His mind became receptive and credulous rather than resistant and unbelieving, it was astonished at nothing, no matter how startling, and felt, often uncorsciously, that noth ing was fixed, nothing stable, nothing secure against change and alteration.

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