The White and the Gold (75 page)

Seldom has so short a span of years produced a more varied, a more exciting, a more romantic history than these eighty-one years out of the seventeenth century. Time has a habit of moving so slowly that any period of equal length in the past would have recorded little of change in the world; a dingier color on the walls of ancient towns, a slash of tailoring scissors converting a tunic, perhaps, into a tabard, a very slight advance in habits of thought, a new song on men’s lips, and a new book to be reverently kept. But these eighty-one years saw the opening of a new continent, a continent of vast extent which would be taken over completely in three centuries by great men in all parts of North America and its amazing resources harnessed. In the process a new spirit of rapid change would be loosed in the world.