e who announce the bankruptcy of an
insolvent and wildcat universe, with no extradition, and who proclaim
God the Great Absconder--they are mostly of the emerged tenth. Their
lips do curl with scorn; and what they scorn most is work--and doers.
For what they deign to praise--observe, sir, for yourself, what they
uphold, directly or by implication. See if it be not a thing compact
of graces possible only to idleness. See if it be not their great and
fatal mistake that they regard culture as an end in itself, and not
as a means for service. Aristocracy? Patricians? In a world which has
known the tinker of Bedford, the druggist's clerk of Edmonton, the
Stratford poacher, backwoods Lincoln, a thousand others, and ten
thousand--a carpenter's son among them?

Returning to the Provisional Government: Regard its members closely,
these gods _ad interim_. The ground of their depression is that
everybody is not Just like Them. They have a grievance also in the
matter of death; which might have been arranged better. It saddens
them to know that so much excellence as theirs should perish from
the earth. The skeptic is slacker, too; excusing himself from the
hardships of right living by pleading the futility of effort.

Unfair? Of course I am unfair; all this is assumption without
knowledge, a malicious imputation of the worst possible motives,
judgment from a part. It is their own method.

A wise word was said of late: "There are poor colonels, but no poor
regiments." It would be truer to change a word; to say that there are
poor soldiers, but no poor regiments. The gloomster picks the poorest
soldier he can find, and holds him up to our eyes as a sample. "This
is life!" says the pessimist, proud at last. "Now you see the stuff
your regiments are made of!"

If one of these pallbearers should write a treatise on pomology he
would dwell lovingly on apple-tree borers, blight and pest and scale.
He would say no word of spray or pruning; he would scoff at the glory
of apple blossoms as the rosy illusion of romance; and he would
resolutely suppress all mention of--apples. But he would feature hard
cider, for all that; and he would revel in cankerworms.

These blighters and borers--figuratively speaking--when the curse of
the bottle is upon them--the ink bottle--they weave ugly words to ugly
phrases for ugly books about ugly things; with ugly thoughts of ugly
deeds they chronicle life and men as dreary, sordid, base, squalid,
paltry,