We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the future—rather, we do impiously, for we beget it, and it is of our blood. The man, the nation that can sneer at unborn loves and unborn enthusiasms is as if a father should kick his son downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is new-fangled is an easy triumph, for the unborn cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it will feel like to wear those clothes, use that unimagined slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the future, have done their cause disservice: old age will have its hit back at the coxcombs for all the H. G. Wells-tedium that manhood endured, in forced silence. But our grandsons will be unwitting accomplices in the conspiracy of unconventionality that now educates us: there will be no attitudinizing about their scepticism, no arriÈre pensÉe in their immorality. To them, as to us, the fashion of the age will seem a Providential culmination: they will play hide-and-seek in its shadowy confines without stopping to ask whether or no they are lost in them. And if they could come down to defend their cause against us, they would surely remonstrate with us by appealing to us to do as we would be done by: “Your own times, too,” they would say, “used one day to seem uncouth, and hectic, and over-emotional: and brilliant pessimists disproved the possibility of doing what you did, before you had time to do it. Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men will be: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same ultimate mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the future; you go into it, and from you it comes.”

That is our apology—ours who are young—for this business of writing forecasts. You may, if you will, be content to read of us only what you will read in scrappy almanacks, but you will lose the sense of your own value in doing so: you will be like one who stops reading a feuilleton at the twentieth chapter, with no more anticipation than such as is offered by the author’s hints of what will follow: or like one who strolls out when the third act of a drama is being played, and whispers to his friends a brief summary of what will be the rest of the plot. We are Act 5 of the drama, you are Act 3; without us, you cannot understand yourselves. You must follow in detail, as it unfolds itself, the development of the times that will spring from you, if you would taste the full savour of the times out of which they sprang. You will accuse our prognostications of partiality and of false perspective: “All will not be so rosy,” you will be tempted to say, “as sanguine forecast has pictured it, you have represented the exceptional as the typical, the typical as the exceptional; hard outlines have become blurred for you, and shadows, in their turn, taken substance.” Well, we do our best; we are puppies, perhaps, and idealists, but you will do well to take our depositions and to sift them for yourselves.

One day you were young, and you too wanted to write forecasts; and you too found that to envisage the future was arduous, that old ways of thinking and status quo ante judgments of value imposed themselves upon your mind, and made you despair of the true estimate and the adequate phrase. And you found that, however unclouded your own faculty of prognostication, you searched in vain for the magic touch which would interpret the future for your older contemporaries, take them forward with you and make them see it with your eyes, your presuppositions. If you could be now what you were then, though it be farther than ever removed from the new days of which this book is an awful warning, you would be more disposed to bear a young man’s nightmares with patience, and allow for him where he has exaggerated, and pardon him where he has erred.