The Brunswick news. [volume] (Brunswick, Ga.) 1906-2016, 1922-10-07
GOOD OLD, BAD OLD, TIMES

GOOD OLD, BAD OLD, TIMES
Tomorrow is usually a little further
off than yesterday. Both, however, are
removed from current discussion and
both have a perspective which in some
ways shows them up in more nearly
their true relations and in some ether
ways distorts the view and makes
them look grotesque. And yet the yes
terday's were once the present, pulls
ing and important and imperative in
demand. Tomorrow, too, will be just
the plain present one of these days:
And they are all alike more or less
in the essential elements that com
pose the conditions of any period.
There AIRED reamers who continually
are visioning the brighter day ahead
cryskaizing ut into the millennium
that is to be the acme of perfect con-
ditions-certainly in a moral way and
probably in a physical and economic
and industrial way, says the Savannah
News. And the dreamers have always
to announce from advancing time to
time postponement, more or less in
definite, of the glad and perfect day
when all the wrongs will be righted.
So. too, there are retrospective dream
ers. forever living in the past and in
vesting the sacred departed days with
a glamor and glory that was never
quite justified by the facts, in the time
when these past times were prosaic
and practical present. These remi-
niscent excerpts harp grandiloquently
upon the good old days" and deplore
the decadence of the new-the deter
ioration of the manners and morals CT
the day in which we live and with
which, after all, alone we have anu
thing really to do.
1t doesn't require an enthusiast or
an optomist of the professionally OBJ
sessed variety to find the actual facts
of the record and learn that the good
old days" were not bit better than
the todays We live through and wres
tie with and glory in. Manners were
not any better in the time of G. Wash
ington than they are now-for the first
gentleman OF the land in writing some
aphorisms upon the subject of COM
mon etiquette, advised his supposedly
Gavalierish readers to refrain from
splitting upon the floors and into the
corners OF the rooms of polite homes.
Manners of the people as a whole to-
day are better, gentler, more courte-
Gus, more unselfish than they were in
these "hazy, daisy, lazy good old
days" And if there are crime waves
that spread over the front pages of
the papers these days and and then
the general moral conditions in this
and in practically every other coun-
trfy are better today in the main than
in those graciously correct days to
which the grouches and GROWERS are
barking back forever by comparisons
and contrast There are more people
now than in the less populous days
of the century ago and there are more
papers and quicker communication
and more thorough publicity of the
remisnesses and delinquencies of the
more people now than when Ben
Franklin started his little gazetteer in
the eighteen hundred and some
thingth year. If you will back some
old timer squarely up against the facts
as his serious and honest memory re-
calls them you will find that this
country was as bad quarter OF
century ago as now-and worse in
many respects. The moral standard
has been raised with the passing years
and the world is better than it was
anywhere and anyhow in those hal
cyon times of the good old days