ONE HUNDRED years ago our world was in a good deal of turmoil. The governments of France and Germany were busy repressing revolutionary movements. Great Britain was thriving under Victoria but fighting the Punjab Wars. In America there was an intellectual drive that reached its height in what Van Wyck Brooks has called the "Flowering of New England." The United States Army was invading Mexico.
The people of our Western civilization were religious. Questions of scripture, sect and creed were of great importance in the lives of most educated men and women. Reformers and idealists flourished. The tolerant liberal was not part of the scene. Customs and dress were formal, among the educated. There was a wide gap between social strata, and class feeling was strong. From the locomotor standpoint the world was still equine, as it had been for three thousand years. People talked horse, thought horse and lived