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of filling the kerosene-lamps. To turn a radiator valve was very different from the daily work of filling the woodbox. Doubtless something attractive, something possibly

An old-fashioned housewife's daily task, before the coming of electricity. of essential value, was missed by the generation of children who thought of light as something you made with the pressure of a finger and thumb on a switch; of heat as something that came through pipes; of milk as something that appeared on the table by the agency of a milk

man, whose visit was so early that many a child grew up without even seeing one. The vogue of the boy-scout movement, designed to recover, at much pains, the arts of chopping wood and making a fire, seemed to recognize that something had been lost with the disappearance of the household chores of earlier childhoods.

The coming of electricity and the gasoline motor might have given man and woman such a freedom from labor and constant care as would have seemed, to the earlier generation, an Arabian Night's dream. Release from much hard physical labor actually came, but life did not become more simple. New needs, new desires, were stimulated. Luxuries became necessities. Man, instead of regarding the new invention as releasing him from just that much labor, allowed it to add to the number of things he thought he must have, or his family thought they must have: radio, automobile, scores of articles that did not retain the status of novel luxuries but became familiar needs almost overnight. The average man conceded almost nothing to be beyond his wants or means.' Instead of comparing his state with the past, instead of reflecting that he was far richer in material comforts and conveniences than George Washington, who was the richest American of his generation - instead of that, the average man made his comparison with the richest of his own generation. He usually wanted as many conveniences, and through the beneficences of science, invention, and the social organization of America, was enabled to approximate what would otherwise have seemed

1 The newspapers stimulated desire. An advertisement of the Crane Company in the New York Times, Sept. 10, 1925, began: "HAS YOUR FAMILY OUTGROWN ONE BATHROOM?" The Washington Star in 1924 printed the following in its reading matter: "Every motorist who plans the construction of a new home should figure on erecting a three-car garage. This message, offered by the Washington Automotive Trade Association, is viewed as being particularly valuable as a suggestion to the home-builder at this time, when many are finding the two-car garage inadequate."

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

43I his preposterous wishes. He got more goods, more things, but also he became more enmeshed in the anxieties of a complex and hurried way of life. He missed the chance of making a possibly more satisfying use of the release from physical labor that electricity brought, the chance for leisure, repose, simplicity of life, and the spiritual qualities that can go with simple living.

But the common generalization that compares the present unfavorably with the past, that pictures the earlier day as golden, is subject to a good deal of qualification. The anxiety to share the latest and highest standard of living may keep the modern man's nose to the grindstone of his family's presumed needs. But that is a fault of inner philosophy, of the individual's management of his personal existence. In any event, worry about meeting the instalments on the automobile is hardly to be compared with the anxiety that attended, as late as 1895, the presence, for example, of diphtheria in the family, or any of many other terrors that science banished.

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17

A MODERN WARRIOR

THE history of this quarter-century in America, if written according to the model of older histories (that is, with emphasis on wars and military leaders), would begin by saying that about the opening of the twentieth century this nation was beset and infested by certain enemies, which continually made war upon it. They were of a peculiar malevolence and persistence, more ruthless and more dreaded than savages, and more successful in their assaults. They poisoned water and food, they launched their attacks through the invisible air, they recognized no laws of war or of humanity. It was impossible ever to have a truce with them; there was no such thing as compromise, or any kind of agreement or understanding. Some kept up their assault continuously, some renewed their attacks each year at fixed seasons, others at longer intervals. Some maintained at all times a foothold on our soil, were never completely dislodged; some went into furtive hiding-places to restore their strength, and returned to their attacks renewed in multitudes and malignity. Some of the most implacable had their strongholds just outside our borders, whence they invaded our shores with a deadliness that at times threw large American cities and great sections of the country into panic and flight. Flight was the sole escape, and that an uncertain one. Courage could only express itself in resignation. Acceptance of death from these enemies as something inevitable became a part of the national philosophy. They pursued methods of warfare so surely fatal, had

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weapons and arts of preparation and assault so secret and ingenious, that the people had no effective methods of defense, indeed practically no defense. The enemies took a toll of death so large as to have an appalling effect on the population; some with a malevolence like Herod's directed their attacks against the very young and destroyed a terrifying proportion of the infants and children.

These wars and invasions would form the principal substance of a history based on the older models; and such a history would recite, as a heroic climax, that beginning about 1900, there arose among the people thus beset certain leaders extraordinarily skilled in strategy, men of a persistence equal to the enemies' own, who invented and developed new means for defense. They gave their lives to study of the methods and equipment of the attackers, discovered facts never before known about the life of the enemies and their vulnerable points, and then, by infinitely painstaking experiments, built up ways not only of successful defense, but actually means to carry the war into the enemies' territory; with the result that some were extirpated utterly from the face of the earth, and others so crippled that they ceased to be a menace.

All this such a history would recite, and add that the people of the nation, in gratitude, set up monuments to the leaders of this successful war, exalted them above rulers and statesmen, and honored them as Vienna honored Sobieski, and Rome Scipio Africanus.

II

In the early months of 1900 there was in Havana, Cuba, an American army surgeon, Major William Crawford Gorgas, sent as an attaché of the American military government that occupied the city after the close of the Spanish-American War. Major Gorgas was of a serene, quiet-moving temperament, and at this time was in a