At the risk of being sneered at as a NeoVictorian, I hereby admit to a nineteenth-century belief that, allowing for daily relapses Land hourly alarms, the world of man is improving. I am not by nature a Panglossian sort but, like the grandparent of a precocious child, I am overwhelmed by a sense of how far my still sprouting human species has come in so short a time.

Compared with the span of history, I am, at seventy-two, very young, but that proposition is hardly as startling as its reverse—that measured against my own age, man himself is young. Consider: If, at my birth, time had proceeded to run backward instead of in the usual fashion, I would at this moment be writing in the year 1837. The same brief span that has brought me to scarcely more than middle age would have carried me back to the year when Andrew Jackson left the White House to Martin Van Buren; when John Quincy Adams, our retired fifth President, was still scolding the House of Representatives about slavery; when young Abraham Lincoln, with only a few months at the bar behind him, moved hopefully to Springfield to open a law office.

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