Remembrance of things past is often dearest to those1
who are bored or driven to despair by the world around them.
To these the contemplation of times gone by brings surcease
from current burdens too heavy to bear. “Take not away from4
me” implored the Emperor Julian, world-weary monarch in
another age of disenchantment, “this mad love for that which
no longer is. That which has been is more splendidly beautiful7
than all that is…” To others, concerned as watchers and
movers with the challenge of today and the promise or menace
of tomorrow, the tale of many yesterdays, reconstructed by the10
history and the science of living men and women, has another
meaning.
By revealing what has gone before, it illumines the13
act of the human adventure now being played and suggests the
pattern of acts to come. The drama of earthborn and
earthbound humanity, despite all its crises and intermissions,16
is a continuous story. All the characters are prisoners of time.
All the problems of the now are forever shaped by the
experiences of a then which extends back in unbroken19
sequence to the origins of life. Each generation has freedom to
choose among alternative designs for destiny, and opportunity
to win some measure of mastery over its fate, only to the extent22
of its comprehension of where it stands in the cavalcade of
years, decades, centuries, and millennia ticked off by the
spinning planet.25
Frederick L. Schuman. International politics: the destiny of the
Western state system. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948, p. 1 (adapted).