The Socialistic Method. 299 



us an ever widening track with ever higher organization and 

 attainment ; and if we surrender ourselves to this illimitable 

 power we do so only in a form of words, for we are born 

 therein, therein have our growth, and the work which is still 

 to be done can only be accomplished through our co-opera- 

 tion : we have no fear of yielding ourselves to the ciirrent 

 for we are a part of the current. Looking into the past we 

 see dimly whence the stream has come. Regarding the 

 present we see over its ever broadening expanse eddies 

 around obstacles here and there, but nevertheless the current 

 is ever flowing onward toward the golden haze which shrovids 

 the future and we see with absolvite assurance that for 

 that portion of the eternal power which flows through us 

 there is only one proper application, and that is toward the 

 removal of the obstacles which vex the current at our feet. 



When I express my dissent from this scheme or that 

 scheme for the reconstruction of human society according 

 to the only true and reliable method for the attainment of 

 millennial conditions, its advocate immediately retorts with 

 just indignation, "Then you are satisfied with things as 

 they are and wish the present conditions to continue." Sat- 

 isfied with things as they are ? The Time-Spirit says of 

 the present order, ' An ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own," 

 yet, unless I have sadly misjudged the course of evolution, 

 the very fact that things are as they are is the most conchi- 

 sive proof which it would be possible to have that they will 

 be different hereafter. Satisfied with things as they are ? 

 Satisfied with misery and want and wretchedness ? Satis- 

 fied with the rule of ignorance, incapacity, and corriiption ? 

 Satisfied with teachings by blatant demagogues or one- 

 sided advocates ? Satisfied with sophisticated foods, filthy 

 streets, hideous buildings, squalid hovels, unfaithful labor, 

 ers, unjust employers, devastated fields and meadows, tree- 

 stripped mountains, ugliness and vulgarity and bad manners 

 without limit ? He must be a singularly constituted man 

 who could be satisfied with these things. And it is the 

 people Avho do these things or profit by them or who permit 

 them to be done, after a race-life of probably more than 

 oOOjOOO years, who or their immediate descendants I am 

 asked to believe, will in one hundred years or one thousand 

 years luive siiffered "a sea change into something rich and 

 strange"; will have cast off all their old characteristics and 

 their old ways, will have put on righteousness as a garment, 

 will have become permeated by a sense of beauty and come- 

 liness, will be animated all by a common desire for the com- 

 mon good! And all this is to result from what? From 



