“ It is the fashion to say, as if with superior knowledge of affairs and of human weakness, that every age has been an age of transition, and that no age is more full of change than another; yet in very few ages of the world can the struggle for change have been so widespread, so deliberate, or upon so great a scale as in this in which we are taking part.
The transition we are witnessing is no equable transition of growth and normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another, its natural heir and successor. ”

“ The result is that working for their cause in the House of Commons to-day is like swimming not merely against a tide but against a cataract. The real reason why the attempts to carry woman suffrage through the House of Commons during the past two years have failed is not merely the difficulty of trying to combine a non-party measure with the party system; it is, above all, the impossibility of using Parliament to pass a bill that the opinion of the country has been fomented to condemn. ”

“ The British people during the past twenty months have seemed more than once to resemble that historic huntsman. They have answered the screaming exhortations of the politicians with whispers of more than Delphic ambiguity; they have gone unconcernedly about their pleasures and their business, to all appearances unvexed by the din of Revolution in their ears; they have presented the spectacle, more common in France than in England, of a tranquil nation with agitated legislators. ”

“ To-day she leads the world in automobile production. Her twenty-five factories turn out, in a year, more than ninety thousand cars, or more than sixty per cent, of the total output of the United States. These cars alone would stretch from New York to Boston.
But these figures do not convey any adequate idea of what the motor-car has done for Detroit. You must go to the spot to feel the galvanic and compelling force that the industry projects. The city is like a mining-camp in the days of a fabulous strike. ”

“ Personally I always try to remember, first, that militancy is the work of only a very small fraction of the women who want the vote and ought to have it, and, secondly, that there have been crazy men just as there are crazy women. Militancy has not affected my own individual attitude toward the main question and never will. But I recognize that it has killed the immediate Parliamentary prospects of any and every Suffrage Bill, and that so long as militancy continues the House of Commons will do nothing. Only a new movement altogether can now bring women to the goal of political emancipation ”

“ Society is looking itself over, in our day, from top to bottom; is making fresh and critical analysis of its very elements; is questioning its oldest practises as freely as its newest, scrutinizing every arrangement and motive of its life; and it stands ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction, which only frank and honest counsels and the forces of generous cooperation can hold back from becoming a revolution. ”

“ There is a car for every one hundred and sixty persons in the United States; twenty-five States have factories; the honk of the horn on the American car is heard around the world.
Such, in brief, is the miracle of the motor's advance. Its development is a real epic of action and progress.
Before going further, it might be well to ask why and how the automobile has achieved such a remarkable development. One reason, perhaps, is that it appeals to vanity and stirs the imagination. A man likes to feel that by a simple pressure of the hand he can control a ton of quivering metal. ”

“ The Chinese revolution marks, in short, a great, decisive step in the onward march of human progress. It benefits not only China, but the whole world, for just as a given society should measure its prosperity not by the welfare of a group of individuals, but by the welfare of the entire community, so must humanity estimate its progress according to the well-being of the whole human race. Society can not be considered to be in a far advanced stage of civilization if one-third of the globe's inhabitants are suffering under the oppression and tyranny of a one-man rule. ”

“ For 700 years Finns have been free men; now they have become Russian serfs, and it is well to make closer connections between the Finnish railway system and the trans-Siberian road. Finns are long-suffering and patient, but who could endure all this?
While the expression of indignation is suppressed in Finland, outside of the Grand Duchy, especially in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Russia's relentless tyranny has made the highest officers of state as resentful as the man in the street. Indeed entire Scandinavia is aflame with indignation and apprehension. ”

“ Any observer who studied the attitude of the great American people in 1898 on the eve of their war with Spain, and again in 1914 during the trouble with Mexico, must have clearly recognized the change. There was so much deeper sense of the tragedy of war, so much clearer appreciation of the gap between aggressive assault and necessary self-defense, so definite a recognition of the fact that murder remains murder, even though it be misnamed glory and committed by wholesale, and that any one who does not strive to stop it becomes a party to the crime. ”

“ The Titanic is gone. Our sorrow for her is becoming but a memory. Our ships carry lifeboats sufficient now; they are compelled to by law. And our sea captains run on safer lines; that, too, the law has made compulsory. But it will be long before man's overweening self-confidence rises from the shock which has been given to his belief in his mechanical ability. Nature is not conquered yet. Ocean has still a strength beyond ours. Ships are not unsinkable; and Death will still take his toll of bold men's lives in the future as he has done in the past. ”

“ Democracy can not be said to exist if a great portion of the people on the earth have not even political freedom. Real democracy exists only when all men are free and equal. Hence, any movement which brings about the recognition and establishment of personal liberty for one-third of the members of the human family, as the Chinese revolution is doing, may well be pronounced to be beneficial to mankind.
But is it really true and credible that conservative, slumbering, and "mysterious" China is actually having a revolution, that beautiful and terrible thing, that angel in the garb of a monster? ”

“ The little people that fought for their republics against a world in arms have not so soon forgotten. It is idle for us in the other parts of the Empire to suppose that the bitter memory of the conflict has yet passed, that the Dutch have forgotten the independence for which they fought, the Vier Klur flag that is hidden in their garrets still, and the twenty thousand women and children that lie buried in South Africa as the harvest of the conqueror. ”

“ If the revolutionaries can break tradition to the extent of abolishing the imperial dignity, what guaranty have we that they will not break with tradition in every other respect as well, and so destroy the foundations on which the whole edifice of China's social, political, and religious life has rested through all the centuries of her known history?
Whether the Chinese people—as distinct from a few foreign-educated reformers—do, as a matter of fact, honestly believe that a republican government is adapted to the needs of the country, is a very different question. ”

“ We stand in the presence of a revolution—not a bloody revolution, America is not given to the spilling of blood—but a silent revolution whereby America will insist upon recovering in practise those ideals which she has always professed, upon securing a government devoted to the general interest and not to special interests. ”

“ We are facing the necessity of fitting a new social organization, as we did once fit the old organization, to the happiness and prosperity of the great body of citizens; for we are conscious that the new order of society has not been made to fit and provide the convenience or prosperity of the average man. The life of the nation has grown infinitely varied. It does not center now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It centers upon questions of the very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is only the instrument. ”

“ Italy had at last asserted herself. The extraordinary efficiency, speed, and secrecy with which the expedition was organized, shipped across the Mediterranean, and landed in Africa, the discipline, moral, and gallantry which both soldiers and sailors displayed, were a revelation to everybody and gave the Italians new confidence in their military forces, and made them feel that they could hold up their heads before all the world unashamed. ”

“ It began to be plain that certain features must be present in every first-class car. Hence came the standardization of the mechanism, which is a big step forward.
What is the result to-day? The automobile has become less of a designing proposition and more of a manufacturing proposition; less of an engineering problem and more of a factory problem. The whole, wide throbbing range of the business is bending to one great end—to meet a demand which, up to the present time, has exceeded the supply.
You have only to go to Detroit to see this pulsating drama of production in action. ”

“ To the protracted sway of Sweden and Finland's continuous relations through her intermediary with Western Europe, the circumstance is to be ascribed that the thinking spirits among the Finns gravitate—in matters of culture—not to Russia but to the West, and in particular to Sweden, with whom Finland is linked by bonds of language—through her highest social class—and of religion, laws, and literature. For that reason the views, ideas, and interests of Western—and in particular of Scandinavian—peoples are more thoroughly familiar and more intelligible to them than ours. ”

“ CHARLES F. HORNE The awful, soul-searing tragedy of Europe's great war of 1914 came to most men unexpectedly. The real progress of the world during the five years preceding the war had been remarkable. All thinkers saw that the course of human civilization was being changed deeply, radically; but the changes were being accomplished so successfully that men hoped that the old brutal ages of military destruction were at an end, and that we were to progress henceforth by the peaceful methods of evolution rather than the hysterical excitements and volcanic upheavals of revolution. ”

“ Even many prominent Socialists, casting the shackles of party fealty to the winds, declared themselves in favor of the Government's African policy and accepted the occupation of Tripoli as a necessity for the country, while the Clericals were even more enthusiastic. But there was hardly a trace of anti-Turkish feeling; it was simply that the people, rejoiced at having awakened from the long nightmare of political apathy and international servility, had thrown off the grinding and degrading yoke of Socialist tyranny, and risen to a dawn of higher ideals of national dignity. ”

“ Young China to-day looks to Europe and to America for sympathy. Let her have it in full measure. Only let us remind her that the work she has so boldly, and perhaps light-heartedly, undertaken is not only the affair of China, not only the affair of Asia, but that the whole world stands to gain or lose according as the Chinese people prove themselves worthy or unworthy to carry out the stupendous task to which they have set their hands. ”

“ An iron grabber is lowered by a crane, it pauses as if to examine the ground before it, in search of a good bite, opens a pair of enormous jaws, takes a grab, and, swinging round, empties its mouthful onto a railway truck. The material is loosened for the shovels by blasts of dynamite and, all the day through, the air is shaken by explosions. Alongside each row of shovels stands a train in waiting; over a hundred and fifty trains run seaward each day loaded with spoil. The bed of the Canal is ribboned with railway tracks, which are shifted as required by special track-lifting machines. ”

“ Men endure great physical hardships in camp and on the battle-field. In our Civil War the death-roll in the Union Army alone reached the appalling aggregate of 359,000. But the suffering and perils of the men in the field, distressing as they are to contemplate, are slight in comparison with the woes and anguish of the women who are left behind. The hope that husband, brother, father, son may be spared the tragic end which all soldiers risk, when they respond to their country's call, buoys them up in their privations and heart-breaking loneliness. ”

“ If somebody puts a derrick improperly secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall on us. Likewise in these great beehives where in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may be, to see that human life is properly cared for, and that human lungs have something to breathe. ”

“ A month later all the Balkan States were at war; Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Italy were arming, and people were anxiously discussing the possibility of a world war. The sudden transition from peace to war appears inexplicable to those unacquainted with the realities of foreign policy.
In July, 1908, the Turkish Revolution broke out. It was a great and immediate success. Never in the world's history had there been so successful a revolution or one so bloodless. As by magic, Turkey was changed from a medieval State into a modern democracy. The Turkish masses were rejoicing. ”

“ Within the short period of two weeks fourteen of the eighteen provinces of China proper joined in the movement one after another with amazing rapidity. Everywhere people welcomed the advent of the revolutionary army as the drought-stricken would rejoice at the coming rain, or the hungry at the sight of food. The great wave of democratic sentiment which had swept over Europe, America, and the islands of Japan at last reached the Chinese shore, and is now rolling along resistlessly over the immense empire toward its final goal—a world-wide democracy. ”