The good old days

"Today we reel at the speed of globalization and long for the placid, pastoral times of, say, Edwardian Britain in the years before World War I. Yet people living in those times did not think their lives were placid or that the pace of change was slow. As suffragettes chained themselves to the fence around the House of Commons, as Lloyd George took on the House of Lords, while revolution brewed in Ireland and the ominous German naval buildup relentlessly continued across the Channel, the Edwardians longed for the pastoral, peaceful days of an earlier time–when the pace of change was slower and society was more stable. They might long for the peaceful tranquility of Jane Austen's England–forgetting that Austen wrote during the Napoleonic Wars, when the world seemed on fire to those who lived in it."

-- Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pg. 286.