United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We do not like to admit that this process has its cycles, that nations and men, like trees and fruit, grow, ripen, and then decay. The world has always had a conceit that the globe could be made entirely habitable, and all over the home of a society constantly growing better.
Though trade has invariably its cycles of good and bad years, like the lean and fat kine in Pharaoh's dream its bursts of prosperity, followed by glut, panic, and distress the thoughtless and spendthrift take no heed of experience, and make no better provision for the future. Improvidence seems to be one of the most incorrigible of faults.
Having tried in vain to represent the motion of Mars by an uniform motion in a circular orbit, and by the cycles and epicycles with which Copernicus had endeavoured to explain the planetary inequalities, Kepler was led, after many fruitless speculations, to suppose the orbit of the planet to be oval; and, from his knowledge of the conic sections, he afterwards determined it to be an ellipse, with the sun placed in one of its foci.
It was this that gave rise to the notorious doctrine of the Wages Fund; the notion that the sum which can at any time be paid in wages is equal to the quantity of capital, alias consumable goods, which happens to exist. To this day it blocks, with an undergrowth of obscurantist controversies, the way to a straightforward account of the problem of trade cycles. The Essence of Waiting.
Well, time runs swift in New York. A medley of crashing music, pungently odd and exhilarating smells, the roaring croon of the steam calliope, the sweet lingering savour of clown-white grease paint, elephants, sleek barking seals, trained pigs, superb white horses, frolicking dogs, exquisite ladies in tights and spangles, the pallid Venuses of the "living statuary," a whole jumble of incongruous and fantastic glimpses, moving in perfect order through its arranged cycles this is the blurred and ecstatic recollection of an amateur clown at the circus.
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal.
Then one sees, as it were, with the vision of God, who looked down upon the old cycles, when a sweltering waste covered the face of the globe, and huge, reptile natures held it in dominion; who beholds the pulpy worm, down in the sea, building the pillars of continents; so one sees the principalities of evil sliding from their thrones, and the deposits of humble faithfulness rising from the deep of ages.
In the fifteenth century, these plays, which were produced almost entirely by laymen, were so numerous that they were formed in cycles or groups. The texts of some of the most famous cycles, those of York, Chester, Wakefield, and Coventry, have survived.
And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and cycles.
I had some conversation with you before I left England, on this subject; and from that time I had purposed to myself to examine as thoroughly as it was possible for me, the important question. Is the march of the human race progressive, or in cycles? But more of this when we meet. What have I done in Germany?
Word Of The Day