these in store for us--these happier, purer hours? The
crime of alcohol is not alone that it destroys its faithful and poisons
one half of the race, but also that it exercises a profound, though
indirect, influence upon those who recoil from it in dread. The idea
of pleasure which it maintains in the crowd forces its way, by means of
the crowd's irresistible action, into the life even of the elect, and
lessens, perverts, all that concerns man's peace and repose, his
expansiveness, gladness and joy; retarding, too, it may safely be said,
the birth of the truer, profounder ideal of happiness: one that shall
be simpler, more peaceful and grave, more spiritual and human. This
ideal is evidently still very imaginary, and may seem of but little
importance; and infinite time must elapse, as in all other cases,
before the certitude of those who are convinced that the race so far
has erred in the choice of its aliment (assuming the truth of this
statement to be borne out by experience) shall reach the confused
masses, and bring them enlightenment and comfort. But may this not be
the expedient Nature holds in reserve for the time when the struggle
for life shall have become too hopelessly unbearable--the struggle for
life that to-day means the fight for meat and for alcohol, double
source of injustice and waste whence all the others are fed, double
symbol of a happiness and necessity whereof neither is human?

6

Whither is humanity tending? This anxiety of man to know the aim and
the end is essentially human; it is a kind of infirmity or
provincialism of the mind, and has nothing in common with universal
reality. Have things an aim? Why should they have; and what aim or
end can there be, in an infinite organism?

But even though our mission be only to fill for an instant a diminutive
space that could as well be filled by the violet or grasshopper,
without loss to the universe of economy or grandeur, without the
destinies of this world being shortened or lengthened thereby by one
hour; even though this march of ours count for nothing, though we move
but for the sake of motion, tending no-whither, this futile progress
may nevertheless still claim to absorb all our attention and interest;
and this is entirely reasonable, it is the loftiest course we can
pursue. If it lay in the power of an ant to study the laws of the
stars; and if, intent on this study, though fully aware that these laws
are immutable, never to be mo