is born with the flower,--thinkers who are fully aware that not all
the forces of all mankind, working with herculean insistence to
support a Lie, can drive back the storm-cloud of the wrath of that
"Unknown Quantity" called God, whose thunders do most terribly
declare the truth "with power and great glory." "How long O Lord,
how long!" Not long, we think, O friends!--not long now shall we
wait for the Divine Pronouncement of the End. Hints of it are in the
air,--signs and portents of it are about us in our almost terrific
discoveries of the invisible forces of Light and Sound,--we are not
given such tremendous powers to play with in our puny fashion for
the convenience of making our brief lives easier to live and more
interesting,--no, there is some deeper reason,--one, which in our
heedless way of dancing over our own Earth-grave, we never dream of.
And we go on making our little plans, building our ships and making
loud brags of our armies, and our skill, and our prowess both by
land and sea, and our amazing importance to ourselves and to
others,--which importance has reached such a height at the present
day as to make of us a veritable spectacle for Olympian laughter,--
and we draw out our little sums of life from the Eternal exchequer,
and add them up and try to obtain the highest interest for them,
always forgetting to calculate that in making up the sum total, that
mysterious "Unknown Quantity" will have to come in, and (un less it
has been taken into due counting from the first) will be a figure
likely to swamp the whole banking business. And in this particular
phase of speculation and exchange, Paris has long been playing a
losing game. So steadily has she lost, in honour, in prestige, in
faith, in morals, in justice, in honesty and in cleanly living, that
it does not seem possible she can ever retrieve herself. Her men are
dissolute,--her women shameless--her youth of both sexes depraved,--
her laws are corrupt--her arts de cadent--her religion dead. What