cover the earth; no savage but has camped upon the sites of proud and
populous cities; no desert but has heard the statesman's boast of
national stability. Our nation, our laws, our history--all shall go down
to everlasting oblivion with the others, and by the same road. But I
submit that we are traveling it with needless haste.

It can be spared--this Jonah's gourd civilization of ours. We have
hardly the rudiments of a true one; compared with the splendors of which
we catch dim glimpses in the fading past, ours are as an illumination of
tallow candles. We know no more than the ancients; we only know other
things, but nothing in which is an assurance of perpetuity, and little
that is truly wisdom. Our vaunted _elixir vitae_ is the art of
printing. What good will that do when posterity, struck by the
inevitable intellectual blight, shall have ceased to read what is
printed? Our libraries will become its stables, our books its fuel.

Ours is a civilization that might be heard from afar in space as a
scolding and a riot; a civilization in which the race has so
differentiated as to have no longer a community of interest and feeling;
which shows as a ripe result of the principles underlying it a
reasonless and rascally feud between rich and poor; in which one is
offered a choice (if one have the means to take it) between American
plutocracy and European militocracy, with an imminent chance of
renouncing either for a stultocratic republic with a headsman in the
presidential chair and every laundress in exile.

I have not a "solution" to the "labor problem." I have only a story.
Many and many years ago lived a man who was so good and wise that none
in all the world was so good and wise as he. He was one of those few
whose goodness and wisdom are such that after some time has passed their