Page:Van Loon--The Story of Mankind.djvu/527

Rh as those sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished.

If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own great-great-grandchildren who will take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But what will they think of those short four thousand years during which we have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglath Pileser, the Assyrian conqueror. Perhaps they will confuse him with Jenghiz Khan or Alexander the Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an end will appear in the light of that long commercial conflict which settled the supremacy of the Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage fought during one hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan troubles of the 19th century (the struggle for freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro) to them will seem a continuation of the disordered conditions caused by the Great Migrations. They will look at pictures of the Rheims cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns as we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined two hundred and fifty years ago during a war between the Turks and the Venetians. They will regard the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and mediæval surgeons.

And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not "modern" at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last generations of the cave-dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made "knowledge and understanding" the foundation upon which to create a more