Overdoing the Past 125 



portrait on every page, and even portraits of 

 those whose back-yards joined the rear gar- 

 den-lots of his first cousins, aid us any ? I 

 admit that his example is still potent, though 

 he has been dead for thirty years, but it is 

 because there are thousands living who dis- 

 tinctly remember him. Will his biographies, 

 rewritten a century hence, as we now have 

 George Washington doled out to us, help the 

 young reader of one hundred years to come ? 

 Not a bit of it. It behooves us to consider 

 our own steps more than the footprints of 

 those who have gone on before. Give me 

 the passing moment, not the dead past, and, 

 too, let us think just a little less of the prob- 

 lematical future ; it, if anything, is wholly 

 fitted to take care of itself. 



Another of my critics says, " If there are 

 any Washingtons or Lincolns about now, 

 they keep themselves exceedingly close." 

 They certainly do, and why ? Because there 

 is not enough interest taken in the present to 

 make them show forth what they really are. 

 Now, this critic, like the other, is an editor, 

 and so supposedly infallible ; but I doubt if 

 either will deny that there are not men for 

 the hour, whatever the character of that 



