long would our
civilization last? In a word, if the world were actually all civilized,
wouldn't it be too weak even to ripen? And now, in the great centres,
where is accumulated most of that we value as the product of man's best
efforts, is there strength enough to elevate the degraded humanity that
attends our highest cultivation? We have a gay confidence that we can do
something for Africa. Can we reform London and Paris and New York, which
our own hands have made?

If we cannot, where is the difficulty? Is this a hopeless world? Must it
always go on by spurts and relapses, alternate civilization and
barbarism, and the barbarism being necessary to keep us employed and
growing? Or is there some mistake about our ideal of civilization? Does
our process too much eliminate the rough vigor, courage, stamina of the
race? After a time do we just live, or try to live, on literature warmed
over, on pretty coloring and drawing instead of painting that stirs the
soul to the heroic facts and tragedies of life? Where did this virile,
blood-full, throbbing Russian literature come from; this Russian painting
of Verestchagin, that smites us like a sword with the consciousness of
the tremendous meaning of existence? Is there a barbaric force left in
the world that we have been daintily trying to cover and apologize for
and refine into gentle agreeableness?

These questions are too deep for these pages. Let us make the world
pleasant, and throw a cover over the refuse. We are doing very well, on
the whole, considering what we are and the materials we have to work on.
And we must not leave the world so perfectly civilized that the
inhabitants, two or three centuries ahead, will have nothing to do.

SOCIAL SCREAMING

Of all the contrivances for amusement in this agreeable world the
"Reception" is the most ingenious, and would probably most excite the
wonder of an angel sent down to inspect our social life. If he should
pause at the entrance of the house where one is in progress, he would be
puzzled. The noise that would greet his ears is different from the deep
continuous roar in the streets, it is unlike the hum of millions of
seventeen-year locusts, it wants the musical quality of the spring
conventions of the blackbirds in the chestnuts, and he could not compare
it to the vociferation in a lunatic asylum, for that is really subdued
and infrequent. He might be incapable of analyzing this, but when he
caught sight of the compa