ans and
the breasts of singing-birds.

Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have
the charms of conversation interfered with. By comparison, music was to
him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society the ideal must be the banishment
of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued
experiment of history--the end of a civilization in a polished
materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness.

I am sure that the scholar, trained to "plain living and high thinking,"
knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and
not in the refinement and accumulation of the material. The word culture
is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a
sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy
training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic
exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture
is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of
the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere
fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower.

You would expect spurious culture to stand aloof from common life, as it
does, to extend its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion a
mere 'cultus,' to construct for its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the
inhabitants dress becomingly, and where there are no Communists. Culture,
like fine manners, is not always the result of wealth or position. When
monseigneur the archbishop makes his rare tour through the Swiss
mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him with boorish
impudence, but strew his stony path with flowers, and receive him with
joyous but modest sincerity. When the Russian prince made his landing in
America the determined staring of a bevy of accomplished American women
nearly swept the young man off the deck of the vessel. One cannot but
respect that tremulous sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to
shrink from staring at the moon when she heard there was a man in it.

The materialistic drift of this age--that is, its devotion to material
development--is frequently deplored. I suppose it is like all other ages
in that respect, but there appears to be a more determined demand for
change of condition than ever before, and a deeper movement for
equalization. Here in America this is, in great part, a movement for
merely physical or material equalization. The idea seems