Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill A PROGRAMME OF CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRESS An address delivered before the Commercial Club, St. Louis, Missouri, February 16, 1918 A PROGRAMME OF CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRESS The record of the past four years shows that the free nations of the world have sadly lacked foresight. Autocracy knew what was coming, helped to bring it on, and systematically organized and prepared for it. The free peoples did not know what was coming, and they are now paying the heavy cost of failure to forecast the future and to be ready quickly and effectively to meet its problems. One of the chief applications of scientific knowledge is in prediction. When one knows what has happened and why it happened he is in position to tell what is likely to happen next. Just so, one of the chief marks of civilization should be foresight. It is not a worthy use of liberty and opportunity merely to drift from day to day, to satisfy instant material and economic wants, with no thought of what is to follow. A truly civilized people will be a ready and a prepared people. So long as wars are inevitable, or even likely, the free peoples will hereafter be ready and prepared for war. But the demands of peace are even more insistent and more compelling than those of war. No civilized people is prepared for peace unless it takes account not only of yesterday and of to-day but of to-morrow and the day after to-morrow. The forces that are makingfor change and for progress, the ideas that are stimulating men to new undertakings and new aspirations are the driving forces to be taken into account by those who would guide and direct public opinion. The novelty of an idea or a suggestion has an attractiveness out of all proportion to its value. Men like the new, the unfamiliar, the untried. Yet the fact that an idea or a...