Soul, is the running gear right?

Courtesy Motor Age, January 3, 1918

WELL, we’ve motored past another milestone. A new road opens up before us, unexplored, untraveled, a clear way ahead. The bells of Time have rung out the old, rung in the new!

Let us set forth with stout hearts and sunny souls, sobered by past experience, renewed with hope in the future, strengthened with faith in our brotherhood, particularly the brotherhood of good motorists!

These are thoughts to which we turn with relief, glad to shift our twelve-months’ burden and start afresh. Sometimes the traveling was good, the road was even, the day was fair; sometimes ’twas slow and painful going, up long and fearful hills, through deep and rocky valleys, often breaking miserably down by the wayside, and often stopped in our heedless speeding by the policeman of Nature and forced to serve our time in the stationhouse of Remorse. But we have learned the Law!

As we linger in retrospect there are accusing phantoms that crowd about us, phantoms of banished ideals, broken resolutions, unconquered sins, but in their mournful faces there is warning also, and abjuration, which we must heed. Because of this we begin the new journey with humbler hearts and chastened spirits, trusting not so much in ourselves as in that great Chauffeur who knows so well the road that lies before us.

Soul, is the running gear right?
Now gi’ us-a hand, my trusty friend!
And here’s to a Happy New Year for us all!