tration of modern speculation and its willing
victims who are so easily led into the "Paradise of Fools!"

[Illustration: GONE.]

FOOLS.

But why mourn and brood over broken fortunes and the calamities of life?
Why tarry in the doldrums of pessimism, with never a breeze to catch
your limp and drooping sails and waft you on a joyous wave? Pessimism is
the nightmare of the world. It is the prophet of famine, pestilence, and
human woe. It is the apostle of the Devil, and its mission is to impede
the progress of civilization. It denounces every institution established
for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of
injustice; it sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and
insincerity; it brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and
scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who
rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is
an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and
the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current through
the facial muscles of a corpse.

God deliver us from the fools who seek to build their paradise on the
ashes of those they have destroyed. God deliver us from the fools whose
life work is to cast aspersions upon the motives and characters of the
leaders of men. I believe the men who reach high places in politics
are, as a rule, the best and brainiest men in the land, and upon their
shoulders rest the safety and well-being of the peace-loving,
God-fearing millions.

I believe the world is better to-day than it ever was before. I believe
the refinements of modern society, its elegant accomplishments, its
intellectual culture, and its conceptions of the beautiful, are glorious
evidences of our advancement toward a higher plane of being.

I think the superb churches of to-day, with the glorious harmonies of
their choral music, their great pipe organs, their violins and cornets,
and their grand sermons, full of heaven's balm for aching hearts, are
expressions of the highest civilization that has ever dawned upon the
earth. I believe each successive civilization is better, and higher, and
grander, than that which preceded it; and upon the shining rungs of this
ladder of evolution, our race will finally climb back to the Paradise
that was lost. I believe that the society of to-day is better than it
ever was before. I believe that human government is better, and nobler,
and