t. History does not forbid us
to hope. But it forbids us to rely upon numbers; they will be against
us. If history teaches anything worth learning it teaches that the
majority of mankind is neither good nor wise. When government is founded
upon the public conscience and the public intelligence the stability of
states is a dream.

In that moment of time that is covered by historical records we have
abundant evidence that each generation has believed itself wiser and
better than any of its predecessors; that each people has believed
itself to have the secret of national perpetuity. In support of this
universal delusion there is nothing to be said; the desolate places of
the earth cry out against it. Vestiges of obliterated civilizations
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