Our capitalists are not popular in these days, but the knights
weren't in theirs, and whenever abuse grows extreme a reaction will
follow. Our critics and reformers think _they_ will be the heroes of
song, but do we sing of critics who lived in the ages of chivalry? There
must have been reformers then who pleaded the cause of down-trodden
citizens, and denounced and exposed cruel knights, but we don't know
their names. It is the knights we remember and idealize, even old
Front-de-Boeuf. They were doers--and the men of the future will
idealize ours. Our predatory interests will seem to them gallant and
strong. When a new Tennyson appears, he will never look up the things
in our newspapers; he won't even read the encyclopedia--Tennysons don't.
He will get his conception of capitalists out of his heart. Mighty men
who built towers to work in, and fought with one another, and engaged in
great capitalist wars, and stood high above labor. King Carnegie and his
round directors' table of barons of steel. Armour, Hill and Stillman,
Jay Gould--musical names, fit for poems.

The men of the future will read, and disparage their era, and wish they
had lived in the wild clashing times we have now. They will try to
enliven the commonplaceness of their tame daily lives by getting up
memorial pageants where they can dress up as capitalists--some with high
hats and umbrellas (borrowed from the museums), some as golfers or polo
players, carrying the queer ancient implements. Beautiful girls will
happily unbuckle their communist suits and dress up in old silken
low-necks, hired from a costumer. Little boys will look on with awe as
the procession goes by, and then hurry off to the back yard and play
they are great financiers. And if some essay, like this, says the
capitalists were not all noble, but a mixed human lot like the knights,
many with selfish, harsh ways, the reader will turn from it restlessly.
We need these illusions.

Ah, well, if we must romanticize something, it had best be the past.

A Man Gets Up in the Morning

A man gets up in the morning and looks out at the weather, and dresses,
and goes to his work, and says hello to his friends, and plays a little
pool in the evening and gets into bed. But only a part of him has been
active in doing all that. He has a something else in him--a wondering
instinct--a "soul." Assuming he isn't religious, what does he do with
_that_ part of him?

He usually keeps that part of