inkers, poets, a new race
of heroes in all lines of human endeavor, who should be able by their
united strength of idea and ideal finally to people the world with gods.

I have among my slaves, who work as vintners and olive-gatherers, a
physician of Thrace, as also a philosopher of the island of Rhodes, a
member of the Pythagorean League. These I bought not long ago from the
Etruscan pirates. Every evening I have them come to me on the roof after
the evening meal, and there under the quiet of the stars we discuss life
and death, the soul and immortality, and all the burning problems of
order, harmony, and number in the universe. What surprises me is that
this Thracian should be so in advance of the physicians of Hellas,
for he holds as I do that the mind should be first considered in the
treatment of most disorders of the body, because of its tremendous
power to force the healing processes, and because sometimes it
actually induces disease and death. And we have talked together of the
incalculable value of faith and enthusiasm so applied in the education
of the child, this new kind of gardening in the budding soul of mankind,
and of what new and august races might thereby come to repeople this
rather unsatisfactory globe.

I am minded to free these slaves, indeed all my slaves, and I have the
intention of devoting the most of a considerable fortune, both inherited
and amassed by me, to the spread of these doctrines and to the public
weal, particularly in the matter of planting in the souls of our youth,
not the mere ability to read and write Greek and do sums in arithmetic,
but the seeds of noble ideas that shall make this Trinacria of ours a
still more wonderful human garden than it has been as a granary for the
world's practical needs. From this sea-centre we send our freighted
galleys to Gades in the West, Carthage in the South, Tyre in the East,
and to the red-bearded foresters of the Far North. I would still send on
these same routes this food, but also better food than this, stuff that
should kindle and feed intellectual fires in all the remote places of
the earth.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other
Plays, by Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLUTTER OF THE GOLDLEAF ***

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