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Updated: June 25, 2025
After half a century of peace the shadow of a great contest loomed dark and near. The whole British nation, sick and tired of Russian double-dealing, was eager to cut the knot of political difficulty with the sword. Everyone was mad to fight; only a few optimists, statesmen mostly, still relying on the sedative processes of diplomacy, had any hopes of averting war.
They are sometimes rather pallid optimists, frequently very worried optimists, occasionally, to tell the truth, rather cross optimists: but they not pessimists; they can exult though they cannot laugh. He has at least withered up among them the mere pose of impossibility. Like every great teacher, he has cursed the barren fig-tree. For nothing except that impossibility is really impossible.
In spite of all the optimists, it is a grievous reflection, after the race has had on earth so many thousands of years for attaining its most advantageous condition there, that all the experience, the philosophy, the science, the art, the power acquired by mind over matter, that all the contributions of all departed and all present spirits and bodies, yes, and all religion too, should have come but to this; to this, that in what is self-adulated as the most favored and improved nation of all terrestrial space and time, a vast proportion of the people are found in a condition which confines them, with all the rigor of necessity, to a mere childhood of intelligent existence, without its innocence.
"Well-meaning optimists," he says, "have seen in this a means of decentralizing capital, so that after a while, in the most peaceable manner, without any one noticing it, capital would be transformed into social property.
As for the others...well, a good many followed their men over, others came after excitement, others, as you say, to do as they pleased, with no questions asked possibly! Mine was 'done' several times. But let us be good healthy optimists such as our country loves and remind ourselves that the worthy outnumber the unworthy and that the really bad would have gone the same way sooner or later."
The optimists who are depending upon the "conservatism" of the American people to maintain intact our political and industrial systems; who proclaim that the present too apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few professional agitators, are of the same myopic brood as those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until the crust over the tartarean fires steadily eaten away from beneath, steadily hammered upon from above gave way with a crash like the crack of doom and that fair land was transformed as if by infernal magic into a high-flaming vortex of chaos, engulfing all forms and formulas, threatening the civilization of a world.
The Prussian ambassador, Lucchesini, had some inkling of this from French sources, as well as from Lord Yarmouth, and on July 28th penned a despatch which fell like a thunderbolt on the optimists of Berlin. It crossed on the way such is the irony of diplomacy a despatch from Berlin that required him to show unlimited confidence in Napoleon.
The real, vital division of the religious part of our Protestant communities is into Christian optimists and Christian pessimists. The Christian optimist in his fullest development is characterized by a cheerful countenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised enjoyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession of faith.
Are such men numerous?" "I have known two. Perhaps it's a coincidence that both were my relations. They're commoner than people think." "You're an optimist, but one likes optimists," Grace remarked with a gentle smile. "However, what had the president done to deserve the sacrifice your uncle made?" "I never knew, but suspect it was something against the laws of his country.
His "Never again" became a winged phrase, and the more buoyant optimists expected to see over the palace of arbitration which was to be substituted for the battlefield, the inspiring inscription: "A la dernière des guerres, l'humanité reconnaissante." Mr. Wilson's vast project was still more attractive. Mr.
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