Thus, various Amerind tribes are devoted to foot-racing; yet the races are not tests of swiftness so much as divinatory or invocatory acts designed to appeal to tutelaries, and are usually set by seasons for planting or harvesting or hunting.

The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present epoch. […] Our century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,—the final expression of all societies.

ffor pride is founde, in every part, Contrarie unto loves Art. And he that loveth, trewly Shulde hym contene iolily, Without pride in sondry wise, And hym disgysen in queyntise.

What could be more selfish, more miserly—this in specific is what gnaws at him—than dying childless, terminating the line, subtracting oneself from the great work of generation? Worse than miserly, in fact: unnatural.