ractically
incorporated in government and in ordinary business, and it will take a
long time for Beethoven to be popularly recognized; but there is growth
toward him, and not away from him, and when the average culture has
reached his height, some other genius will still more profoundly and
delicately express the highest thoughts.

HERBERT. I wish I could believe it. The spirit of this age is expressed
by the Calliope.

THE PARSON. Yes, it remained for us to add church-bells and cannon to
the orchestra.

OUR NEXT DOOR. It's a melancholy thought to me that we can no longer
express ourselves with the bass-drum; there used to be the whole of the
Fourth of July in its patriotic throbs.

MANDEVILLE. We certainly have made great progress in one art,--that of
war.

THE YOUNG LADY. And in the humane alleviations of the miseries of war.

THE FIRE-TENDER. The most discouraging symptom to me in our undoubted
advance in the comforts and refinements of society is the facility
with which men slip back into barbarism, if the artificial and external
accidents of their lives are changed. We have always kept a fringe of
barbarism on our shifting western frontier; and I think there never was
a worse society than that in California and Nevada in their early days.

THE YOUNG LADY. That is because women were absent.

THE FIRE-TENDER. But women are not absent in London and New York, and
they are conspicuous in the most exceptionable demonstrations of social
anarchy. Certainly they were not wanting in Paris. Yes, there was a city
widely accepted as the summit of our material civilization. No city was
so beautiful, so luxurious, so safe, so well ordered for the comfort
of living, and yet it needed only a month or two to make it a kind of
pandemonium of savagery. Its citizens were the barbarians who destroyed
its own monuments of civilization. I don't mean to say that there was
no apology for what was done there in the deceit and fraud that preceded
it, but I simply notice how ready the tiger was to appear, and how
little restraint all the material civilization was to the beast.

THE MISTRESS. I can't deny your instances, and yet I somehow feel that
pretty much all you have been saying is in effect untrue. Not one of
you would be willing to change our civilization for any other. In your
estimate you take no account, it seems to me, of the growth of charity.

MANDEVILLE. And you might add a recognition of the value of human life.

TH