, that they are so
perfect, so compact, that they ignore all these excrescences, these
untied ends, in making up their whole. Yet it is a wonderful bit of
mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in
his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his
faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going
back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a
Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of
eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real,
every man's life should have the integrity of meaning of that of a tree.
A. statesman, B. seer, C. scavenger: pines, raspberries, oaks.
Impossible, as we know. And then, a thistle at the beginning knows it is
a thistle, and cannot be anything else, so there is the end of it; but
when Pratt, by nature _ne_ knife-grinder, asserts himself poet, what
then? How many men know their vocation? Who is going about to tie on the
labels? Who would you be willing should tie on yours? Then, again, there
is your neighbor Brownson, with a yeasty brain, fermenting too fast
through every phase of creed or party to accept a healthful "settling";
so it is left to work itself out, and it will settle itself by-and-by,
in a life or two it may be. You know other brains which, if you will but
consider, prove this life to be only one stage of a many-yeared era:
they are lying fallow from birth until death; they have powers latent in
them, that next time, perhaps, will bear golden grain or fruit. Now they
are resting, they lie fallow. Communism allows no time for fermentation,
or lying fallow; God does: for brains, I mean, not souls. But what are
we going to do with this blindness of human beings as to what they are
fit for,--when they go, or are forced to go, stumbling along the wrong
path all their lives? Why, the bitterest prayers that God bears are from
men who think they have lost time in the world. The lowest matter alive,
the sponges, _fungi_, know what they have to do, and are blessed in the
doing, while we--Did you think the Socialist helped the matter? Men
needed thousand years' education to make their schemes practicable; they
ignored all this blindness, all selfishness, and overgrowth of the
passions: no wonder these facts knobbed themselves up against their
system, and so, in every instance it crumbled to pieces. The things are
facts, and here; there is no use in