w, too, as no one to-day seems
to perceive, the intimate connection between the preaching of false reform
and the gripe of a sordid plutocracy. He saw that most reformers, by
presenting materialism to the world in the disguise of a sham ideal, were
really playing into the hands of those who find in the accumulation of
riches the only aim of life, that they are in fact one of the chief
obstacles in the path of any genuine reformation. The humanitarianism that
attains its utterance in Mr. Markham's rhapsodic verse loses sight of
judgment in its cry for justice. It ceases to judge in accordance with the
virtue and efficiency of character, and seeks to relieve mankind by a
false sympathy. Such pity merely degrades by obscuring the sense of
personal responsibility. From it can grow only weakness and in the end
certain decay.

LIX

FROM PHILIP'S DIARY

_Finivi_. The last word of my _History of Humanitarianism_ is written, and
it only remains now to see this labour of months--of years,
rather--through the press. I know not what your fate will be, little book,
in this heedless, multitudinous-hurried world; I know but this, that I
have spoken a true word as it has been given me to see the truth. That any
great result will come of it, I dare not expect. Only I pray that, if the
message falls unregarded, it will be because, as she said, my bells ring
too high, and not for want of veracity and courage in the utterance. After
all it is good to remember the brave words of William Penn to his friend
Sydney: "Thou hast embarked thyself with them that seek, and love, and
choose the best things; and number is not weight with thee." I have tried
to show how from one ideal to another mankind has passed to this present
sham ideal, or no-ideal, wherein it welters as in a sea of boundless
sentimentalism. I have tried to show that because men to-day have no
vision beyond material comfort and the science of material things--that
for this reason their aims and actions are divided between the sickly
sympathies of Hull House and the sordid cruelties of Wall Street. And I
have written that the only true service to mankind in this hour is to rid
one's self once for all of the canting unreason of "equality and
brotherhood," to rise above the coils of material getting, and to make
noble and beautiful and free one's own life. Sodom would have been saved
had the angel of the Lord found therein only ten righteous men, and our
hope to-day depen