stomach, without any readjustment of the world. What, then, might be the wealth of redemption in a reform of will that would shut the loosened jaw and lift up the downcast gaze toward the gradual self-betterment within hoe-reach of any will that wills it?

For such a will, as well as by it, modern Society is made. Its laws enact will. Its institutions incorporate will. Its wealth rewards will. Its suffrages and emoluments honor will. Its progress is a progress of will. And if this world-weight bends any man's back, it is because he would rather have it on his back than in his brain, where it would be as weightless as thought. Take it off his back without putting it into his brain, and will the brow be less slant? The burden of the world! The awful weight of the atmosphere! The suffocation of the sky!

Let me confess that I like them, O soothsayers of a better world than God's or man's-like them, with their faults, above any Paradise your mawkish dreams can dream. Man as he is to be by being what he now is, and working out his salvation by will and the socialization of wills-him I believe in, his hells as well as his heavens; heavens the higher because of the hells they span; hells whose very depths are heights like ravines of a mountain range -heights because conscious, and therefore in sight of the heavens that slope down to the first steps of any foot that would climb.

But your heaven of omnipotent environmentwhat one celestial trait can it have in its economic salvation of souls that must be unsouled in order to

be saved? For, when character, bad or good, is explained by environment, there is neither vice nor virtue, neither injustice nor justice. The rich as well as the poor are what they are by environment. Private property steals public wealth under stress of environment. Capital oppresses labor by compulsion of environment. Churches play hypocrite and parasite instead of genuine saint, by the pulling of the puppet wires of environment. Nobody is to blame or praise. Obligation there is none to pity or redress. Rights are all wrong, if wrongs are all right. The "ox" man is as base as a banker; the banker as cherubic as if own brother to the ox.

What can

It is all environment-all a machine. be expected of the world machine but to grind on in its predestined way? There is no other Lord God" to make a "thing," or give it "dominion"; no gulf between moral idiots and "seraphim," because no "seraphim" but those that fly in idiotic fancies.

"Monstrous shape!" Why monstrous? It is as perfect as environment can make it. "Soulquenched!" Why should not environment quench souls as well as create them? "Touch it again with immortality!" When did environment, the law of constant change, ever immortalize any life, let alone deadness? How will the future answer this man's brute question? Brutes ask brutal questions; and a future of brutal environment will answer them in its own brutal way.

Give me a human hell rather than such a heaven -a hell where I can stay until my misery burns into

my vices some little sense of a self which may grow to a universe that is mine, a God that is "me. And this, I dare prophesy, will be the "ox" man's manliest speech when, after the silence of centuries, his "dumb terror" does "reply to God."

IV

THE IDEAL MAN

"Is this the thing the Lord God made and gave,

To have dominion over sea and land;

To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of eternity?"

HERE is an ideal man.

THERE

He not only ought to

be, but has been and even now is. An Ought, that never is, seems very grand in its transcendence of all reality, but its transcendence is too everlasting for any present sway. Its Don Quixote strut is all the more categorical and imperative because played on a stage apart from every-day use and attainment. How clear and self-evident and absolute it is up there in the ideologist's head where it calls its high court conscience, and issues its pompous mandates of impossible perfection to an ever imperfect world! The world ought to be thus, and thus, and thus; and when it becomes any "thus," it still ought to be some other "thus"; for the Ought must always outstrip attainment, else it would cease to be an Ought, and lose its categorical and imperative crown, which cannot signify the rule of a realm that proves the beneficence of its reign by any constant process of ideals realized or realities idealized, but does betoken an infinitely autocratic

right to criticise and condemn what was or is or will be forever to criticise and condemn by its forever inaccessible standards, themselves above all criticism. No man, no society can come up to its requirements or approach them. The greater the progress, the farther away the goal, so that progress may never by any signs of approach be tempted to think itself progress, and grow proud. All successes must be failures, and the greater the success, the greater the failure. Forwards must more and more appear to be backwards, and the height the depth.

But when progress, or that movement of man which imagines itself progressive, detects this mockery of its endeavors, it may in sheer desperation grow critical of its critic, and begin to mock its mocker. Who gave you, Sir Quixote of the ages, your right to such lofty airs? Is a captain a captain, though he train and lead no soldiery; a king a king when he has no dominion? Is not a dominion without facts a sway of pure fancy? It is the fantastic nature of your realm that makes your decrees so sure and facile and imperative? Naught but a ghost goes abroad in your disembodied way to haunt and taunt the living it can not help-a ghost whose only real and proper abode is the grave. Get you down, goblin of arrogant idleness, from a world which you disclaim, and which, therefore, is not yours, even to visit! Abide in your own shadow-world, and rule its shadows if you can!

But the sceptred goblin can not rule its own shadOWS. There is no more prominence, achievement, success, among them than among the realities they