Boulder Place Directory 14

And, of course, just as we cannot escape the economic and the military reaction of European development, neither can we escape the moral. If European thought and morality did, by some fatality, really develop in the direction of a Nietzschean idealization of military force, we might well get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ideals, and morals.

I heard at that place an extraordinary account of how a dirigible balloon, with nobody on board, had some few years before passed over the house. The balloon--which my informant, in his ignorant language, called a "huge square globe"--flew, according to him, a flag, the stars and stripes, and had an anchor dangling down. The balloon was travelling in a westerly direction. It flew a little higher than the trees, and caused a great scare among the natives. My informant told me that there was no one in the car at all, but they waved their hands at him (_sic_) when they passed over his house! He then told me that the air-ship had passed in the daytime and had quickly disappeared, but that it was beautifully lighted with coloured lights at night. So that it would be difficult from that truthful account to place much reliance on what the man said or on what he had seen at all. It is quite possible--after discarding all the indisputable embroidery from the story--that a balloon actually went over that place, and it may probably have been Wellman's abandoned balloon with which he had tried to go across the Atlantic.

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