Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/168



HATEVER the characteristics of the age we live in, its principal tendency is one of exchange—exchange of culture as well as commodities. We give of our surplus for what we receive of the surplus of others. And not infrequently our own products, whether of the mind or the machine, undergo, as they pass from hand to hand, a modification, a transformation, which makes them welcome again at our door. Our luxuries come back to us as necessities; our enthusiams, as firm resolutions; our ideals, as practical standards of living.

And consciously or not, something is always being done to guard against a break in the circle. One wave is followed by another and the circling stream is ever flowing between the civilized nations of the world. Apparently it dries up sometimes in certain places; but in reality it has only