Time & Perspective Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Transition is the default human mood: we’re always convinced the ground is shifting under our feet. Balch opens by granting that suspicion, almost gently puncturing the self-importance every generation clings to. Then she pivots with a careful, telling hedge: "we can hardly be mistaken perhaps". The phrase performs the tension she’s diagnosing. It’s modest on the surface, yet it smuggles in a firm claim of exceptional upheaval. She knows the charge of melodrama; she also thinks the evidence overwhelms it.

As an educator writing in the long shadow of industrialization, world war, and the early machinery of globalization, Balch is not describing change as a vibe but as a civic problem. "Momentous" signals consequence, not novelty. "Rapid" and "ever quickening" make acceleration the real antagonist: when the pace outruns institutions, habits, and moral imagination, people reach for panic, nostalgia, or simplistic politics. Her syntax mimics that speed, stacking clauses until you feel the breathlessness of trying to keep up.

The subtext is quietly disciplinary. Balch invites readers to resist two temptations at once: the narcissistic belief that our anxieties are unprecedented, and the complacent belief that history’s velocity is manageable without new forms of learning and public responsibility. Coming from a reform-minded educator (and, in her era, a prominent peace advocate), the line doubles as a curriculum: train yourself to see patterns across time, but don’t let that perspective become an excuse for inaction when the rate of change begins to bend society’s load-bearing beams.