save the wretched scraps of wealth that they
had. It was a common saying amongst them, Let the country be cleared of
everything except valiant living men, rather than that we fall into
slavery again!"

He sat silently thinking a little while, and then said:

"When the conflict was once really begun, it was seen how little of any
value there was in the old world of slavery and inequality. Don't you
see what it means? In the times which you are thinking of, and of which
you seem to know so much, there was no hope; nothing but the dull jog of
the mill-horse under compulsion of collar and whip; but in that fighting-
time that followed, all was hope: 'the rebels' at least felt themselves
strong enough to build up the world again from its dry bones,--and they
did it, too!" said the old man, his eyes glittering under his beetling
brows. He went on: "And their opponents at least and at last learned
something about the reality of life, and its sorrows, which they--their
class, I mean--had once known nothing of. In short, the two combatants,
the workman and the gentleman, between them--"

"Between them," said I, quickly, "they destroyed commercialism!"

"Yes, yes, yes," said he; "that is it. Nor could it have been destroyed
otherwise; except, perhaps, by the whole of society gradually falling
into lower depths, till it should at last reach a condition as rude as
barbarism, but lacking both the hope and the pleasures of barbarism.
Surely the sharper, shorter remedy was the happiest."

"Most surely," said I.

"Yes," said the old man, "the world was being brought to its second
birth; how could that take place without a tragedy? Moreover, think of
it. The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the
life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and
surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair
flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new spirit of the
time. All other moods save this had been exhausted: the unceasing
criticism, the boundless curiosity in the ways and thoughts of man, which
was the mood of the ancient Greek, to whom these things were not so much
a means, as an end, was gone past recovery; nor had there been really any
shadow of it in the so-called science of the nineteenth century, which,
as you must know, was in the main an appendage to the commercial system;
nay, not seldom an appendage to the police of that system. In spite