And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born. In the case of America, indeed, a warning to this effect is instant and essential. America, of course, like every other human thing, can in spiritual sense live or die as much as it chooses. But at the present moment the matter which America has very seriously to consider is not how near it is to its birth and beginning, but how near it may be to its end. It is full of bustle and excitability, like Athens after its ruin, and all the Greek cities in their decline.
Young men read chronicles, but old men read newspapers.
All these are things quite compatible with fundamental tedium and decay. Beyond government, which is, as it were, the very shape and body of a nation, the most significant thing about any citizen is his artistic attitude towards a holiday and his moral attitude towards a fight, that is, his way of accepting life and his way of accepting death. Marley Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent.