Perhaps you picked up your newspaper one morning and read an editorial that went something like this:

"The world is too big for us. Too much going on, too many crimes, too much violence and excitement. Try as you will, you get behind in the race, in spite of yourself. It's an incessant strain to keep pace…and still, you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. The political world is news seen so rapidly you're out of breath trying to keep pace with who's in and who's out. Everything is high pressure. Human nature can't endure much more!"

Was that editorial written last week or last month or last year? Believe it or not, it appeared in a newspaper called The Atlantic Journal on June 16, 1833—more than 150 years ago.