lessed in everything. That you know from the Horace of your
own school days. But, seldom hearing men speak the truth, you may
not know that to some of us, at least, there is no return for the
price we pay. When we give up juggling with facts for the sake of
performing the work of the world, we know that, instead of
achievement,

Mournful phantoms of dreams are there,
Fancies as vain as the joys they bear,
Vain--for think we that good has neared,
It slips through the hand or e'er 't has appeared,
And the vision has vanished on wings that keep
Company on the paths of sleep.

"I can make you see this in my own life by an illustration which may
surprise you. Some of you have envied me my power to enrich and
beautify Greece. You imagine that I myself find some satisfaction
in the white marble over the Stadion in Athens, in the water works
in Olympia, where we no longer drink in fevers, in the embellishments
at Delphi, in the theatre at Corinth. You think it a great thing that
I can, by turning to my money, create memorials to myself in the
greater comfort of cities of Asia Minor and of Italy. But I tell you
that all these things are nothing to me because the only thing I want
to do for my country is to connect the two seas at Corinth by a canal
cut through the solid earth. What is all the rest? A playing with
perishable materials, an erecting of 'memorials' which you and I find
beautiful and serviceable, which in another hundred years may serve
but to mark the transitoriness of our civilisation, and of which in
five hundred years only traces will remain to be pointed out as
Mycenae was pointed out to you, Alpheus, by a goatherd, driving his
flocks where once was a city of gold. My 'success' is of the moment.
My desire is for the conquest of nature herself, to bind her for all
time to the service of man. The idea of a canal teased Julius Caesar,
and Nero, with purple pomp, began to cut the rock; and yet the land
still stands between the eastern and the western seas, limiting
commerce, exhausting energies. When Panathenaic games are no longer
held in the Stadion, when Apollo speaks clearest from other oracles
than Delphi, Greeks will be building ships; Asia Minor, Egypt and
India will be sending their treasures to Italy; the passage from east
to west will be utilised. I should have done a thing for all time,
not for ourselves."

The speaker paused as his hot eyes swept over his guests. Then he
rushed on aga