Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most do congregate the words of Watts' hymn have constant application:
_For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do._
When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at the seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats. Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what many of them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveys the scene can scarcely think so.
But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto cars dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the contrasts of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill millions take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos of the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the _Régime Ancien_? The issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generating heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers of population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection?
One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since "Adam delved and Eve span"--if they ever did--in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia," to the "goings on" in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike's Peak--the earth we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness--but surely it was never livelier than it now is; as the space-writer says, more "dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque and interesting."
Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one sort and another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened from his misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to something like enthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second birth which shall recreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles of modern invention with a corresponding development of spiritual life; or has it reached the top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms that compose it, is it starting downward on the other side into an abyss which the historians of the future will once again call "the dark ages?"