y love to the
President when you see him next," and "Don't forget to remember me
kindly, please, to the chairmen of both your national committees!"

IV

In a world of sin, disease and death--death inevitable--what may man do
to drive out sin and cure disease, to the end that, barring accident,
old age shall set the limit on mortal life?

The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics has played a leading
part in human affairs. Only within a relatively brief period has science
made serious progress toward discovery. Though Nature has perhaps an
antidote for all her poisons many of them continue to defy approach.
They lie concealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the dark.

That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things.
The ideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the
fabled bag of gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of
perfectability anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues.
Its processes and objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream
which lends itself equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the
scheming of the self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders.

Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing
with things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the
inner lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance;
makes fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not
an engine of oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not
a zealot, a promoter of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of
uplift, who disregarding individual character would make virtue a matter
of statute law and ordain uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or
assembly, is likelier to produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime
state he claims to seek.

The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism
was the discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the
bedrock of our political philosophy. Human slavery was assuredly an
indefensible institution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not
make a black man a white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking to
control the food and drink and dress of the people make men better men.
Danger lurks and is bound to come with the inevitable reaction.

The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The
leaders of feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimis