his community so refined
that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to
the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid
lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things--I
cannot abide with them.

What men want, he says, is something more precipitous, something with
more zest in it, with more adventure. Nearly all the Utopias paint the
life of the future as a kind of giant Chautauqua, in which every man and
woman is at work, all are well fed, satisfied, and cultivated. But as
man is now constituted he would probably find such a life flat, stale,
and unprofitable.

Man is not originally a working animal. Civilization has imposed work
upon man, and if you work him too hard he will quit work and go to war.
Nietzsche says man wants two things--danger and play. War represents
danger.

It follows that all our social utopias are wrongly conceived. They are
all based on a theory of pleasure economy. But history and evolution
show that man has come up from the lower animals through a pain economy.
He has struggled up--fought his way up through never-ceasing pain and
effort and struggle and battle. The utopias picture a society in which
man has ceased to struggle. He works his eight hours a day--everybody
works--and he sleeps and enjoys himself the other hours. But man is not
a working animal, he is a fighting animal. The utopias are ideal--but
they are not psychological. The citizens for such an ideal social order
are lacking. Human beings will not serve.

Our present society tends more and more in its outward form in time of
peace toward the Chautauqua plan, but meanwhile striving and passion
burn in the brain of the human units, till the time comes when they find
this insipid life unendurable. They resort to amusement crazes, to
narcotic drugs, to political strife, to epidemics of crime, and finally
to war. The alcohol question well illustrates the tendencies we are
pointing out. Science and hygiene have at last shown beyond all
question that alcohol, whether in large or smaller doses, exerts a
damaging effect upon both mind and body. It lessens physical and mental
efficiency, shortens life, and encourages social disorder. In spite of
this fact and, what is still more amazing, in spite of the colossal
effort now being put forth to suppress by legislative means the traffic
in liquor, the per capita consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United
States increases from year