Time & Perspective Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Balch frames technology less as a miracle than as infrastructure: a set of "facilities" that makes old limits feel negotiable. The phrasing matters. She doesn't claim time and distance disappear; she says barriers are "lessen[ed]". That restraint is a moral posture, typical of an educator and reformer wary of intoxication by progress. The list that follows - telegraph, cable, telephone, radio - reads like a roll call of compression technologies, each one shaving latency off human connection, each one tightening the feedback loop between far-flung people. The cadence ("and the rest") signals that the point isn't any single gadget; it's the trendline.

The subtext is political. Balch lived through an era when speedier communication was reshaping diplomacy, finance, and propaganda - and when internationalism was colliding with nationalism. If messages can cross oceans in minutes, isolation becomes less a geographic fact than a choice. Her sentence quietly tilts toward responsibility: once you can know faster, you can no longer plead ignorance as easily. "Facilities" implies capacity, not virtue; the same channels that carry cooperation also carry panic, rumor, and mobilization.

Context sharpens the intent. Writing across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Balch watched communications knit empires and markets together while world wars proved that interconnection doesn't automatically yield understanding. The quote works because it's both clear-eyed and open-ended: technology reduces friction, but it doesn't resolve the harder problem of what humans do with proximity.