of nature--in this today of agitation
incident to journeying, we are in some respects better off, in
other respects worse off, than the race was ten or fifteen
thousand years ago. We have lost much of the freedom that was
ours before the rise of governments and ruling classes; we have
gained much--not so much as the ignorant and the unthinking and
the uneducated imagine, but still much. In the end we which
means the masses of us--will gain infinitely. But gain or loss
has not been in so-called morality. There is not a virtue that
has not existed from time ages before record. Not a vice which
is shallowly called "effete" or the "product of
over-civilization," but originated before man was man.

To speak of the conditions in which Susan Lenox now lived as
savagery is to misuse the word. Every transitional stage is
accompanied by a disintegration. Savagery was a settled state
in which every man and every woman had his or her fixed
position, settled duties and rights. With the downfall of
savagery with the beginning of the journey toward that hope of
tomorrow, civilization, everything in the relations of men with
men and men with women, became unsettled. Such social systems
as the world has known since have all been makeshift and
temporary--like our social systems of today, like the moral and
extinct codes rising and sinking in power over a vast multitude
of emigrants moving from a distant abandoned home toward a
distant promised land and forced to live as best they can in
the interval. In the historic day's journey of perhaps fifteen
thousand years our present time is but a brief second. In that
second there has come a breaking up of the makeshift
organization which long served the working multitudes fairly
well. The result is an anarchy in which the strong oppress the
weak, in which the masses are being crushed by the burdens
imposed upon them by the classes. And in that particular part
of the human race en route into which fate had flung Susan
Lenox conditions not of savagery but of primitive chaos were
prevailing. A large part of the population lived off the
unhappy workers by prostitution, by thieving, by petty
swindling, by politics, by the various devices in coarse, crude
and small imitation of the devices employed by the ruling
classes. And these petty parasites imitated the big parasites
in their ways of spending their dubiously got gains. To have
a "good time" was the ideal here as in idle Fift