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War

I do abhor;

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And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum or fife, and I forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchering without a soul.

Without a soul-save this bright treat
Of heady music, sweet as hell;

HE tradition of the stage is a tradition of villains and heroes. Shakespeare was a devout believer in the existence of the true villain—the man whose terrible secret is that his fundamental moral impulses are by some freak of nature inverted, so that not only are love, pity, and honor loathsome to him, and the affectation of them which society imposes on him a constant source of disgust, but cruelty, destruction, and perfidy are his most luxurious passions. This is a totally different phenomenon from the survivals of the ape and tiger in the normal man. The average normal man is covetous, lazy, selfish; but he is not malevolent, nor capable of saying to himself, "Evil: be thou my good." He only does wrong as a means to an end, which he always represents to himself as a right end. The case is exactly reversed with a villain; and it is my

And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human Life!
The tears fill my astonished eyes,
And my full heart is like to break,
And yet it is embannered lies,
A dream those drummers make.

Oh, it is wickedness to clothe
Yon hideous, grinning thing that stalks
Hidden in music like a queen
That in a garden of glory walks,

Till good men love the thing they loathe;
Art, thou hast many infamies,
But not an infamy like this.

O, snap the fife and still the drum,
And show the monster as she is.
"The Illusions of War," by Richard Le Gallienne

melancholy duty to add that we sometimes find it hard to avoid a cynical suspicion that the balance of social advantage is on the side of gifted villainy, since we see the able villain, Mephistopheles-like, doing a huge amount of good in order to win the power to do a little daring evil, out of which he is as likely as not to be cheated in the end; whilst your normal respectable man will countenance, connive at, and grovel his way through all sorts of meanness, baseness, servility, and cruel indifference to suffering in order to enjoy a miserable

lips, bristling rags,
unclean sores. . . ..
Oh, how horribly
had poverty
gnawed that un-
happy being!

He stretched out
to me a red, bloat-
ed, dirty hand...
He moaned, he bel-
lowed for help.
I began to rum-
mage in all my
pockets.. Neither
purse, nor watch,
nor even handker-
chief did I find...
I had taken nothing
with me.

And the beggar
still waited...and
extended his hand,
which swayed and
trembled feebly.
Bewildered, con-
fused, I shook that
dirty, tremulous
hand heartily....
"Blame me not,
brother; I have
nothing, brother."

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O make my readers realize what a philosopher is, I can only say that I am a philosopher. If you ask incredulously, "How, then, are your articles so interesting?" I reply that there is nothing so interesting as philosophy, provided its materials are not spurious.

For instance, take my own materials— humanity and the fine arts. Any studious, timorously ambitious bookworm can run away from the world with a few shelves full of history, essays, descriptions, and criticisms, and, having pieced an illusory humanity and art out of the effects produced by his library upon his imagination, build some silly systematization of his worthless ideas over the abyss of his own nescience. Such a philosopher is as dull and dry as you please; it is he who brings his profession into disrepute, especially when he talks much about art, and so persuades people to read him. Without having looked at more than fifty pictures in his life, or made up his mind on the smallest point about one of the fifty, he will audaciously take it upon himself to explain the development of painting from Zeuxis and Apelles to Raphael and Michelangelo s s

As to the way he will go on about music, of which he always has an awe-stricken conceit, it spoils my temper to think of it, especially when one remembers that musical composition is taught (a monstrous pretension) in this country by people who read scores, and never by any chance listen to performances. Now, the right way to go to workstrange as it may appear-is to look at pictures until you have acquired the power of seeing them. If you look at several thousand good pictures every year, and form some sort of practical judgment about every one of themwere it only that it is not worth troubling over-then at the end of five years or so you will, if you have a wise eye, be able to see what is actually in a picture, and not what you think is in it. Similarly, if you listen critically to music every day for a number of years, you will, if you

have a wise ear, acquire the power of hearing music. And so on with all the arts

When we come to humanity it is still the same: only by intercourse with men and women can we learn anything about it. This involves an active life, not a contemplative one; for, unless you do something in the world, you can have no real business to transact with men; and unless you love and are loved, you can have no intimate relations with them. And you must transact business, wirepull politics, discuss religion, give and receive hate, love, and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity.

If you are to acquire the sense sufficiently to be a philosopher, you must do all these things unconditionally. You must not say that you will be a gentleman and limit your intercourse to this class or that class; or that you will be a virtuous person and generalize about the affections from a single instance-unless, indeed, you have the rare happiness to stumble at first upon an all-enlightening instance. You must have no convictions, because as Nietzsche puts it, "convictions are prisons." Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

You will say, perhaps, that if this be so, there should be no philosophers; and perhaps you are right; but though I make you this handsome concession, I do not defer to you to the extent of ceasing to exist.

After all, if you insist on the hangman, whose pursuits are far from elevating, you may very well tolerate the philosopher, even if philosophy involves philandering; or, to put it another way, if, in spite of your hangman, you tolerate murder within the sphere of war, it may be necessary to tolerate comparatively venial irregularities within the sphere of philosophy Je

It is the price of progress; and, after all, it is the philosopher, and not you, who will burn for it.

-George Bernard Shaw.

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Overhead a bright, mute, pale-green sky. A hard, cruel frost; firm, sparkling snow; from beneath the snow project grim blocks of ice-bound, windworn cliffs.

Two huge masses, two giants rise aloft, one on each side of the horizon: the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn.

And the Jungfrau says to its neighbor: "What news hast thou to tell? Thou canst see better.-What is going on there below?"

Several thousand years pass by like one minute. And the Finsteraarhorn rumbles in reply: "Dense clouds veil the earth ... Wait!"

More thousands of years elapse, as it were one minute.

"Well, what now?"'inquires the Jungfrau. "Now I can see; down yonder, below, everything is still the same: partycolored, tiny. The waters gleam blue; the forests are black; heaps of stones piled up shine gray. Around them small beetles are still bustling,-thou knowest, those two-legged beetles who have as yet been unable to defile either thou or me." "Men? "

"Yes, men."

Thousands of years pass, as it were one minute ♪♪❤

"Well, and what now?" asks the Jungfrau

"I seem to see fewer of the little beetles," thunders the Finsteraarhorn. "Things have become clearer down below; the waters have contracted; the forests have grown thinner."

More thousands of years pass, as it were one minute.

"What dost thou see?" says the Jungfrau

"Things seem to have grown clearer round us, close at hand," replies the Finsteraarhorn; "well, and yonder, far away, in the valleys there is still a spot, and something is moving."

"And now?" inquires the Jungfrau, after other thousands of years, which are as one minute.

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E said, "I see." And they said: "He's crazy; crucify him." He still said: "I see." And they said: “He 's an extremist." And they tolerated him. And he continued to say: I see." And they said: "He 's eccentric." And they rather liked him, but smiled at him. And he stubbornly said again: "I see." And they said: "There's something in what he says." And they gave him half an ear. But he said as if he'd never said it before: "I see." And at last they were awake; and they gathered about him and built a temple in his name. And yet he only said: I see." And they wanted to do something for him. “What can we do to express to you our regret?" He only smiled. He touched them with the ends of his fingers and kissed them. What could they do for him? "Nothing more than you have done," he answered. And what was that? they wanted to know. "You see," he said, "that's reward enough; you see, you see."-"The Prophet," by Horace Traubel.

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EMBRANDT belongs to the breed of artists which can have no posterity. His place is with the Michelangelos, the Shakespeares, the Beethovens. An artistic Prometheus, he stole the celestial fire, and with it put life into what was inert, and expressed the immaterial and evasive sides of nature in his breathing forms.-Emile Michel.

TEP by step my investigation of blindness led me into the industrial world. And what a world it is! I must face unflinchingly a world of facts a world of misery and degradation, of blindness, crookedness, and sin, a world struggling against the elements, against the unknown, against itself. How reconcile this world

HERE has arisen in society a figure

which is certainly the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful, upon which the eye of the moralist can dwell. That unhappy being whose very name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned

Life! we've been long together
Through pleasant and through
cloudy weather;

'T is hard to part when friends
are dear-

Perhaps 't will cost a sigh, a
tear;

Then steal away, give little
warning,

Choose thine own time;
Say not Good-Night—but in
some brighter clime
Bid me Good-Morning.

"Life," by Anna Letitia Barbauld

of fact with the
bright world of my
imagining? My
darkness had been
filled with the light
of intelligence, and,
behold, the outer
day-lit world was
stumbling and
groping in social
blindness. At first
I was most un-
happy; but deeper
study restored my
confidence By
learning the suffer-
ings and burdens
of men, I became
aware as never be-
fore of the life-
power that has sur-
vived the forces of darkness-the power
which, though never completely victor-
ious, is continuously conquering. The
very fact that we are still here carrying
on the contest against the hosts of
annihilation proves that on the whole
the battle has gone for humanity. The
world's great heart has proved equal to
the prodigious undertaking which God
set it. Rebuffed, but always persevering;
self-reproached, but ever regaining faith;
undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man
labors towards immeasurably distant
goals. Discouraged not by difficulties
without, or the anguish of ages within,
the heart listens to a secret voice that
whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the
future lies the Promised Land."

-Helen Keller.

Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious. -Addison.

and insulted as the vilest of her sex and doomed, for the most part, to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every age as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man

Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue.

But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would bepolluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony of remorse and despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people.-William E. H. Lecky.

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NEW era is dawning on the world. We are beginning to believe in the religion of usefulness

RATORY offers the acme of human

ORATOR

delight; it offers the nectar that Jupiter sips; it offers the draft that intoxicates the gods, the divine felicity of lifting up and swaying mankind. There is nothing greater on this earth. 'T is the breath of the Eternal-the kiss of the Immortal I

Oratory is far above houses and lands,

The golden poppy is God's gold,

The gold that lifts, nor weighs

us down,

The gold that knows no miser's hold,

The men who felled the forests, cultivated the earth; spanned the rivers with bridges of steel, built the railways and canals, the great ships, invented the locomotives and engines, supplying the countless wants of civilization; the men who invented the telegraphs and cables, and freighted the electricspark with thought and love; the men who invented the looms and spindles that clothe the world, the inventors of printing and the great presses that fill the earth with poetry, fiction and fact, that save and keep all knowledge for the children yet to be; the inventors of all the wonderful

The gold that banks not in the

town,

But singing, laughing, freely

spills

Its hoard far up the happy hills; Far up, far down, at every turn— What beggar has not gold to

burn!

"The California Poppy," by Joaquin Miller

machines that deftly mold from wood and steel the things we use; the men who explored the heavens and traced the orbits of the stars-who have read the story of the world in mountain range and billowed sea; the men who have lengthened life and conquered pain; the great philosophers and naturalists who have filled the world with light; the great poets whose thoughts have charmed the soul, the great painters and sculptors who have made the canvas speak, the marble live; the great orators who have swayed the world, the composers who have given their souls to sound, the captains of industry, the producers, the soldiers who have battled for the right— these are our Christs, apostles and saints. The books filled with the facts of Nature are our sacred scriptures, and the force that is in every atom and in every star— in everything that lives and grows-is the only possible god.-R. G. Ingersoll.

offices and emoluments, possessions and power. While it may secure all of these it must not for a moment be classed with them. These things offer nothing that is worthy of a high ambition. Enjoyed to their fullest, they leave you hard, wrinkled and miserable. Get all they can give and the hand will be empty, the mind hungry, and the soul shriveled

Oratory is an individual accomplish

ment, and no vicissitudes of fortune can wrest it from the owner. It points the martyr's path to the future; it guides the reaper's hand in the present, and it turns the face of ambition toward the delectable hills of achievement. One great speech made to an intelligent audience in favor of the rights of man will compensate for a life of labor, will crown a career with glory, and give a joy that is born of the divinities. There is no true orator who is not also a hero.

-John P. Altgeld.

no one has success until he has the

abounding life. This is made up of the many-fold activity of energy, enthusiasm and gladness. It is to spring to meet the day with a thrill at being alive. It is to go forth to meet the morning in an ecstasy of joy. It is to realize the oneness of humanity in true spiritual sympathy.-Lillian Whiting.

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