o reach
for the ultimate end of action is never to begin to act.

Deeper and more worthy of respect is the sadness of science. The effort
"to see things as they really are," to get out of all make-believe and
to secure that "absolute veracity of thought" without which sound action
is impossible does not always lead to hopefulness.

There is much to discourage in human history,--in the facts of human
life. The common man, after all the ages, is still very common. He is
ignorant, reckless, unjust, selfish, easily misled. All public affairs
bear the stamp of his weakness. Especially is this shown in the
prevalence of destructive strife. The boasted progress of civilization
is dissolved in the barbarism of war. Whether glory or conquest or
commercial greed be war's purpose, the ultimate result of war is death.
Its essential feature is the slaughter of the young, the brave, the
ambitious, the hopeful, leaving the weak, the sickly, the discouraged to
perpetuate the race. Thus all militant, nations become decadent ones.
Thus the glory of Rome, her conquests and her splendor of achievement,
left the Romans at home a nation of cowards, and such they are to this
day. For those who survive are not the sons of the Romans, but of the
slaves, scullions, the idlers and camp-followers whom the years of Roman
glory could not use and did not destroy. War blasts and withers all that
is worthy in the works of man.

That there seems no way out of this is the cause of the sullen despair
of so many scholars of Continental Europe. The millennium is not in
sight. It is farther away than fifty years ago. The future is narrowing
down and men do not care to forecast it. It is enough to grasp what we
may of the present. We hear "the ring of the hammer on the scaffold."
"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." "The sad kings," in
Watson's phrase, can only pile up fuel for their own destruction, and
the failure of force will release the unholy brood which force has
caused to develop. The winds of freedom are tainted by sulphurous
exhalations. In all our merry-making we find with Ibsen that "there is a
corpse on board." The mask is falling only to show the Death's head
there concealed. Aristocracy, Democracy, Anarchy, Empire, the history of
politics, is the eternal round of the Dance of Death.

When we look at human nature in detail we find more of animal than of
angel, and the "veracity of thought and action," which is the choicest
gift of Sc