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Most who walk upon this earth attend to a single thing, and that thing is the present hour. Their thought reaches no further than the minute that follows the minute they inhabit — the next breath, the next errand, the slow accretion of an afternoon — and in this they are not to be despised, for they are the people of the present, and they love the brief warmth of their own duration. They think upon their days, their country, the faces of those who live beside them. They recoil from war and lift their voices toward peace; and if they hold the powerful and the moneyed in suspicion, it is because, from where they stand, the powerful and the moneyed are the authors of every grief whose origin they cannot otherwise name.

Others cast their gaze a little past the present — not toward today but toward the morning after, the week, the season, the year. These are the stewards of time. They labour within the great houses of commerce; they tend the machine and keep its gears in oil; they purchase duration and they sell it. It falls to them to arrange the world and afterward to varnish it, to pronounce upon it the gentle benediction: the world is safe, and we who keep it are the gentle ones.

Yet beyond the farthest horizon of time there lies a country without horizon at all, and that country is eternity. There are upon this earth a scattered few whose contemplation does not halt at the decade — who think in the long cadence of generations, in the turning of centuries, in the slow procession of the thousand-year. These hold the power. And let no man, arriving at this passage, let his mind fall to money; for money is but cipher and pigment, a figure pressed upon paper. Think rather upon time, and upon power, which is time's only true coin.

Regard the world as it presents itself today, and it wears the countenance of sanity: I render unto you, and you render unto me. In the western hemisphere at least, and in the great cities that crowd the margins of the sea, the world appears very nearly as it appeared the day before — continuous, untroubled, and persuaded of its own permanence.

Let us, then, move the horizon. Upon the global scale — not the parish but the planet — and beheld from the vantage of a thousand years: who, in truth, are we? This is history, and this is the just manner of its beholding: in time and in space together. Do you think upon history? Do you think upon the time and the space of us, this species of Homo sapiens? Take, for the sake of the question, the politician. It would astonish the casual eye to learn how many constraints — perhaps a multitude beyond reckoning — have been laid upon him, layer upon patient layer: liberalism, democracy, the corporation, the architecture of the constitution, the division of parties, the appetite of every faction and every interest that contends within the realm, and over all of it the long shadow of the public debt. He cannot vault over these. He must decide within them. And his decision, once made, is conducted through the labyrinthine vessels of administration until, for good or for ill, some thing comes at last to pass in the time that is not yet.

His office, therefore — rightly understood — is to defer: to postpone the hour of decision and to hold back the actualization of the event. He may do little; he adjusts by some slight degree the inclination of the slope, and stays, here and there, a portion of what would otherwise descend. And so I lay before you a further question: is money an evil thing? Which is to ask, in the same breath, whether time is an evil thing. Time is neither good nor evil; it flows. And in its flowing it works our change, and our change conducts us, in the end, to our dissolution. Yet there is no fault to be charged against time, nor against the change it brings; for they are not other than what they were ordained to be.

We are, in the strange arithmetic of the cosmos, too vast and too consequential by far. The greatest things lie folded within the least; it is a contradiction — yet are not contradictions everywhere among us, and are they not beautiful? We shall vanish presently into the reckoning of cosmic time. We shall be returned, soon enough, to the dust of spent stars and the silence of enormous stone. But here, for this interval, we stand: small and trembling vertebrate things, a creature lifted out of the line of the apes, who has built the thing we have agreed to call civilization. We built it; our fathers and our mothers raised and tended it before us. We are, I say again, too vast by far.

War is coming. The freezing of time is coming. But here, even so, we are — and it would be well, before the cold, that we should know the place in which we stand.