178 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



its color — is it sulphur-yellow in the shadow? It 

 causes me to think of an acquaintance of mine, a 

 man of great wealth and the power which comes 

 with wealth. He has two "hobbies," as the world 

 calls them — painting and gardening. His paintings 

 are of no consequence save to him, but they repre- 

 sent his effort to put on canvas the beauty he feels in 

 the natural world. His garden, too, answers a crea- 

 tive impulse of his soul to make something beauti- 

 ful. I have seen him stroke softly the petals of a 

 rare peony as if he were caressing the head of a child. 

 Yet I know from many conversations that he be- 

 lieves in his "divine right" to control the industrial 

 destinies of the men in his mills, simply because he 

 owns the machinery, no less firmly and tenaciously 

 than the Kaiser believes in his right of kingship. 

 He will not treat with a union, his face grows hard 

 and arrogant at any mention of industrial democ- 

 racy, and the squalor and ugliness of the habita- 

 tions and the lives of his workers are in strange 

 contrast to his own beds of peonies. He is one of 

 those men — too numerous, alas! — who are fighting 

 for democracy abroad without any conception of a 

 changed ideal of democracy at home. My friends 

 the socialists would call this man a hard taskmaster, 

 and admit no good in him. He would be marked 

 among the first victims if a revolution were to come 

 here. And, indeed, I have to admit that they 

 would have considerable justification. Yet I know 

 that his soul hungers for beauty, that it goes out to 

 spiritual meetings with things lovely and of good 

 report. I who have seen him admire a peony can 

 hardly realize that he has cursed a committee of 



