t
answers what easier than the demolition of a sexless world gone entirely
mad? How simple the engineries of destruction. Civil war in America;
universal hara-kiri in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself
in self-indulgence. Then a thousand years of total eclipse. Finally
Macaulay's Australian surveying the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from
a broken parapet of London Bridge; and a Moslem conqueror of America
looking from the hill of the Capitol at Washington upon the desolation
of what was once the District of Columbia. Shall the end be an Oriental
renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha, Mohammed and Confucius
welded into a new religion describing itself as the last word of
science, reason and common sense?

Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most
do congregate the words of Watts' hymn have constant application:

_For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do._

When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote
their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There
are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at
the seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled
Cats. Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what
many of them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who
surveys the scene can scarcely think so.

But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto
cars dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the
contrasts of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill
millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as
the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the _Regime
Ancien_? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of
generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded
centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?

Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping
back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser
and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to
perfection?

V

One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since "Adam delved and
Eve span"--if they ever did--in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia,"
to the "goings on" in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike's
Peak--the earth we inhabit has at no time and now