THE TEXAN HUNTRESS. 303 
‘Young man, you speak like one who had been in the 
world just twenty-one years, and that, having eyes, had not 
seen. Do you not know that progress, like all other of God’s 
great Laws, moves in the spiral—upwards? That it must 
bring us around again to the same conditions from whence we 
started—though above them. A close approximation to the 
savage life anc virtues will be the highest civilization. It is the 
ferocious vices we shall have conquered, and the heroic virtues 
we shall have attained. These stern savage races go down 
before the wheels of progress because they will not bend; with 
the light that was given them, they are too faithful and too 
strong to yield. It is a bastard civilization that is really un- 
true—begotten. of luxury or lust—its children are the true 
Neros of ferocity and brutality. The world needs brains 
now more than thews and sinews. The need is too great for 
true hearts to stop at conventional forms, which, after all, are 
the mere disguises of unbounded licentiousness. The millions 
groan, and we must work each in his own appointed way.” 
“But Ido not understand from all this why the common 
relation of husband and wife should be reversed.” 
“Ah, yes! Then the constant tendency of this struggle 
of civilization toward the simpler forms and a purer light, is 
to intensify the action of the mental and spiritual natures, 
rather than the mere physical. The mental searches for the 
mechanical means of rescue, the soul for the spiritual. Both 
are maddened by the clamorous cries of suffering nations into 
a morbid activity—the results of which are most frequently 
‘confusion worse confounded’——and an unnatural development 
of the brain, or of the mental in relation to physical. Where 
this condition has supervened, it is the office of dove to restore 
the equilibrium; and in the true marriage, upon whichever 
party the lot of extreme spiritual and mental development 
shall fall, the doctrine of Utility requires of him or her a 
life-dedication to the great cause, in whatever direction tho 
