The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1907-06-06
The Old and New Civilization.

Class Oration by Miss Blanche Woodard.
There is a tendency in man to swing,
pendulum-like, from extreme to extreme.
We can trace it from the individual
with his hobbies and eccentricities, to
4 the masses with their ever-varying and
unreliable public opinion. We can
mark it in the more slow and steady
sweep of thought from century to cen
tury, and from age to age; in the alter
nate succession of days and nights of
civilization-dark ages and golden ages
of light.
1t is this tendency in man that ac-
counts for the two opposite extremes of
what we term the old and the new civili-
zations-the civilization that dazzled
the world with the golden age of Greece
and the civilization of which the twen-
tieth century is but the corning light;
the civilization which recognized the
spiritual Plato as the supreme monarch
of thought, and the civilization which
crowns the orator, Bacon, as the great
est philosopher of the world-the age
which may be distinguished as the age
of the beautiful and the age of the use
full.
This old civilization was magnificent
garden, in which the beautiful, the
spiritual, and the ideal were cultivated
with the choicest care, and in which
the useful, the material and the practi-
! cal were rooted out as rank and insight
| ly weeds. From this we'll titled soil
grew and blossomed poetry, from whose
fragrance the poets of all ages have
drawn their sweetness; eloquence,
whose unrivaled periods still ring in
our ears, architecture, which has ever
been the model and marvel of the world;
sculpture, to whose divine beauty our
boasted age still bows in admiring wor-
ship. But, with however much of ad-
miration we may look back upon the
glorious achievements of these old
Greeks, we must still admit that they
went to the extreme in their cultiva-
! tion of the beautiful and neglect of the
useful. Their philosophers scorned the
idea of debasing their knowledge for
the advancement of the useful arts.
| They had famous sculptors, but bungling
mechanics; splendid rhetoricians, but
stupid doctors; dreams of delightful re-
pose in the Elysian fields, but no vulgar
| vision of spring mattresses ION this side
of the Acheron.) Steam might have
lifted the lids of teakettles before the
eyes of these old dreamers for endless
centuries, but railroads would still be
unknown. To their Imaginative minds
the thunder-bolt told no tale of the
telegraph, but was the rattling of Jove's
chariot wheels over the golden pave
| ments of Heaven.
In the fullness of time there came
into the fields of thought practical
husbandman, Francis Bacon, who was
not satisfied with mere flowers, which,
however beautiful, could but please and
adorn; but desired fruit" which could
supply the more necessary wants of
man. He, therefore, left this old garden
of beauty, and in far border fields
scattered the seeds of philosophy which
were destined to bring forth rich har-
vests of usefulness. The fruits of this
great philosophy have ripened into
what we call practical age-and which,
with equal propriety, might be termed
the age of miracles-an age in which
thought busies itself with the great
problem of benefiting the condition of
man an agein which the hidden secrets
of God have been found out and mans
powers invested with the powers OF
omnipotence, until his feeble voice has
been made to echo across continents
and his thoughts to pass beneath the
pillows of tho deep -an age in which
the petty bubbles of metaphysicians