AN American journalist called Lincoln Steffens who visited the Soviet Union in
1919 recorded his impression in a memorable sentence: I have seen the future and it works".
If only it had been, not just memorable, but true.
I remembered the phrase when some of those commenting on crime in Ireland in the 199Os took to citing the 195Os as years of certainty and security.
Clearly, another case of wishful thinking: we have seen the past and it didn't work either.
And, as I write, these words, which were intended to convey the folly of trying to recreate the conditions of 49 years ago, take on a more ominous meaning:
Reports from London confirm an IRA bombing at Canary Wharf, though with what authority is still unclear.
So much has been invested in the movement towards peace by politicians in Ireland, Britain and the US. So many hopes have been raised among the people of Northern Ireland that it would be tragic if it were so cruelly halted now.
But if the reported IRA statement is genuine and the ceasefire which began 18 months ago has indeed been broken, then the task of those who were so hesitantly circling each other in the search for a political settlement becomes not just urgent but desperate.
As I listen, politicians are still clinging to the hope that Sinn Fein, at least, has not abandoned the peace process. If this is the case then an essential link in the process will have been saved.
If not, our concerns with violence on a local scale and comparisons with the 195Os will prove insignificant. As it is, all it takes to put a superficial shine on the 195Os is a rub of nostalgia.
But it's hard to understand how anyone who lived through those years - unlike the young fogeys who simply wished they had can pine for their return.
True, it was a decade in which authority was unquestioned and property respected, the streets were safe and, if people were poor, at least they knew their place.
That place, as a rule, was England. It was the place, not only for the poor and jobless but for anyone who questioned authority or fell foul of the law.
Many a defendant was given the benefit of the doubt on the promise that he'd head straight for the train and boat and a berth with the brother in Kilburn. We exported our crime just as we exported unwanted pregnancies or anything else that was better out of sight and out of mind.
There were side effects, of course. The population fell drastically. Between 1951 and 1961 around 410,000 people went, mostly to England. Sean Lemass in opposition claimed the rate was higher.
(When Fianna Fail was in power we in the Irish Press didn't mention emigration at all. As Joe Walsh said in the Dail during the week, Fianna Fail doesn't stand for evasion.)
Emigration not only kept the crime rate down, it sapped the energy of towns, villages and country places, inspired such books as The Vanishing Irish and left a particularly compliant crew in charge where the bulk of the population was made up of the very young and the old.
But those who say that this is a fearful society - having done their best to make it so - are wrong to suggest a contrast with the 195Os; at least as wrong as in their wild comparisons with other countries.
When the novelist Deirdre Purcell was asked lately on RTE about the atmosphere of the early 1960s when she was growing up, she said the pervasive feeling was one of fear.
She recalled being afraid of people in authority, "afraid of everybody".
Just so. The 1950s and early 1960s, during which the potentially troublesome part of the population was shipped overseas, was a period in which many who remained were cowed or beaten into submission.
My father, a teacher, often warned youngsters that they'd end up in an industrial school. He'd taught in such a school when he first qualified and ever afterwards loathed the brothers who ran the place with appalling brutality.
In our secondary school some of the teachers - priests in this case - decided that the way to waken people up on raw mornings was to beat the daylights out of them with leather straps and wooden towel rollers. I suppose they thought that in a class of 30 they were bound to hit someone who deserved it.
Deirdre Purcell was right: an air of casual and unremitting violence pervaded the 1950s. These were the years when the industrial schools, orphanages and laundries which have lately been exposed were not just functioning, but considered to be performing a valuable public service.
For some odd reason - perhaps because so many of the poor had gone - the illusion that Ireland was a classless society gained ground at the time. Lemass was quoted saying so in the London Times.
No one would dream of pretending that ours was a class-less society now: the people who were once safely dispatched on the Princess Maud or locked behind orphanage doors are no longer out of sight and off our consciences.
Some are on our doorsteps, on the perimeters of cities and towns; living in areas of cheap local authority housing often designed, it would appear, to resemble the camps of the migrant poor in some of the major cities of southern Europe.
But political attention is focused on poverty and the risks it carries only when a bout of violence occurs and, then, as often as not, the official reaction not to mention that of wild-eyed commentators - is to reach for old institutional remedies and convenient scapegoats.
Then reason takes flight and the air is thick with screams of fear and anger. Anyone who is not already afraid must begin to worry, and futile rage is directed at a Minister who cannot even get a hearing for the facts.
If the Minister is the first, most obvious scapegoat, travellers come next - Ireland's version of the racist card, played by some politicians for convenience and, more shamefully, by journalists and broadcasters.
The pattern is familiar. Because the gardai say they suspect travellers are involved in some attacks, some reporters and commentators seek links between travellers and all other violent events, including murders.
The case for the connection is made whether the evidence supports it or not, and at present the evidence is thin: most of the highly publicised murders of late appear to have differed little from the commonplace.