here wanted for
liveliness--but surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the
space-writer says, more "dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks,
quite so "picturesque and interesting."

Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one
sort and another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened from
his misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to something
like enthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second birth which
shall recreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles of modern
invention with a corresponding development of spiritual life; or has
it reached the top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms that
compose it, is it starting downward on the other side into an abyss
which the historians of the future will once again call "the dark ages?"

We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually
happening were unbelievable if we did not see it, from hour to hour,
from day to day. Horror succeeding horror has in some sort blunted our
sensibilities. Not only are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of
the slaughter and the sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the
selfish thought that, having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull
through without paying our share. This will account for a certain
indifferentism we now and again encounter.

At the moment we are felicitating ourselves--or, is it merely confusing
ourselves?--over the revolution in Russia. It seems of good augury. To
begin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly won for the Allies,
we are promised by the optimists a wise and lasting peace.

The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told,
the death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones
that echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the
masses muffled in the Schwarzwald and along the shores of the North
Sea, and up and down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered
message which may presently break into song; the glad song of freedom
with it glorious refrain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached
the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, all will be well!"

Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and
solicitous pessimism, observing and considering many abuses,
administrative and political, federal and local, in our republican
system--abuses which being very visible are most lamentable--may
sometimes move us to los