ofessional uplift--what do we find but
the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as "friends of the
people," preaching the pussy gospel of "sweetness and light?"

"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the
press have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of
the futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect
the futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper
are after all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are told, "the
one-eyed man is king." In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise
of the agitator is apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We have been
teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and as a
consequence--the rule of numbers the law of the land, partyism in the
saddle--legislation, state and Federal, becomes largely a matter of
riding to hounds and horns. All this, which was true in the fifties, is
true to-day.

Under the pretense of "liberalizing" the Government the politicians
are sacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its
checks and balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty
are being loosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary;
while nowhere do we find intelligence enlightened by experience,
and conviction supported by self-control, interposing to save the
representative system of the Constitution from the onward march of the
proletariat.

One cynic tells us that "A statesman is a politician who is dead," and
another cynic varies the epigram to read "A politician out of a job."
Patriotism cries "God give us men," but the parties say "Give us
votes and offices," and Congress proceeds to create a commission. Thus
responsibilities are shirked and places are multiplied.

Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations is mortal even as is
the life of man--in all things of growth and decline assimilating--has
not our world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a moment
may it not be about to take the downward course into another abyss of
collapse and oblivion?

The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for
man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile
annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to the
ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle and
muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making
men and women over aga