Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 016 1931

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CREATED BY SCIENCE* JOHN Ross DELAFIELD, A.M., L.L.B., D.S.M., BRIGADIER-GENERAL, ORDNANCE RESERVE, U. S. A. Mr. President, and Fellow Members: Interested in history, you are certainly also interested in current events and in the future of our country as well as its past. No one can understand or see the future or the present in this country unless he has some conception of the past and in the facts and events that have led up to our being what we are. It is not true that history repeats itself. It is true that there is a background of thought, of motive, of activity, and of sequences in history that do repeat themselves. I am going to talk to you about a matter that concerns us all as citizens and especially as a group of citizens who live in this part of the United States. We are fortunate in having Dr. Poultney Bigelow with us today. I am going to invite him to get up and tell us what he thinks about what I say and, if he differs in all or in part, to say so.

As we go on in life we are amazed to see the tremendous progress that is made along certain lines of knowledge and its mechanical application, at the same time that other things in our country remain stationary and hardly move at all. An example of that is the condition in regard to transportation.

You all know how long it took for those who came in sailing vessels to reach this country. You know how long it took in the steam boats sixty or seventy years ago and how long it now takes to cross in a modern steamship. Why, only the other week a man was made famous in a day and a half by flying from New York to Paris. Our statisticians are always at work on these things with more or less correctness. They have arrived at a careful calculation and conclusion that if the relative size of the world fifty years ago was assumed to be the size of a football then today in terms of transportation it is the size of a walnut. *Address, delivered on May 15, 1931, before the Dutchess County Historical Society.

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