William Allan Neilson

“ We realize as never before the inconveniences and the perils of ignorance. In point of time we are, as it were, standing on a great watershed of history—a height of land between the slope down which run streams back into the distances of the pre-war period, and the slope down which are beginning to wear their channels the currents of the new time. ”

“ A South Sea islander, to whom nature supplies food almost without effort on his part and for whom climate makes clothing and shelter almost matters of indifference, needs to trouble little about politics, foreign or domestic, and may be so little curious that he does not miss the results of science. A Lloyd George or a Wilson at the Peace Table, planning for the future of a world, has need of all knowledge. ”

“ The methods of warfare were throughout the struggle continuously developing, and science was making vast contributions to the agencies of destruction, as well as to the prevention and healing of disease and wounds. Great figures of the pre-war period suffered eclipse and new personalities emerged. Almost every branch of human thought was affected by the impact on the minds of men of the unexpected turn of events and by the unforeseen developments of the psychology of nations and of individuals. ”

“ The progress of science outside of warfare, the advance of medicine and mechanical invention, the evolution of motor vehicles, the rise of the moving picture, new economic and industrial developments, recent political changes, all have called for new treatment.
Meantime, amid all the confusion and revolution, scholars have not intermitted their labors, and the harvest of their efforts is gathered up in the revision of articles on literature and philosophy. Education, physical, technical, professional, and general has progressed ”

“ Councilman has prepared articles on physical education, biology, and eugenics. All the statistical matter has been brought up to the latest possible date, so that, in respect to correspondence to the facts as they are at the present moment, the Encyclopædia can claim to be the most complete work of reference of its sort in existence.
The nature and amount of knowledge with which a man can get through life has varied enormously according to time and circumstances. ”

“ The task of revision has been no easy one, especially since so much is still unsettled. But to follow the events that each day is still bringing forth men need to have accessible a precise account of what has happened in the last seven years. ”

“ The self-sufficing community becomes rarer and rarer, the purely self-dependent individual has become impossible. In the Western World democracy has given every man a voice in his government, and his government has a voice in the affairs of all other governments. ”

“ The treaties which brought the conflict to a formal close have modified the frontiers of half the countries of the world, and have produced an entirely new arrangement of economic forces; while inside the various countries the experiences of the war have produced far-reaching changes in industrial economy and the position of women. ”

“ But this time has gone by. There is not the remotest farmer on our prairies whose welfare is not involved in the fluctuations of international exchange or in the deliberations of a Reparations Commission. ”

“ The course of the actual fighting involves naval events in all the oceans, and land fighting from Flanders eastward to Vladivostok. The forces include the populations of countries hardly known previously to the Western nations, and economic and geographical features hitherto familiar only to specialists. ”