huge hearty London policeman, of taking hold of them—­taking hold of them by the seats of their little trousers if need be, and taking them home to Mother—­some way of setting them down hard in their chairs and making them thoughtful!  Nothing but a national literature will do this.  “Life,” (which is, with one exception, perhaps, the only religious weekly we have left in America) succeeds a little and has some spiritual value because it succeeds in making American millionaires look funny, and in making them want to get away and live in Europe.  But “Life” is not enough; it merely hitches us along from day to day and keeps our courage up.  We want in America a literature, we want the thing done thoroughly and forever and once for all.  We want an Aristophanes, a master who shall go gloriously laughing through our world, through our chimneys and blind machines, pot-bellied fortunes, empty successes, all these tiny, queer little men of wind and bladder, until we have a nation filled with a divine laughter, with strong, manful, happy visions of what men are for.

All we have to do is to have a News-book—­a bookful of the kind of rich men we want, then we will have them.  We will see men piling over each other all day to be them.  Men have wanted to make money because making money has been supposed to mean certain things about a man.  The moment it ceases to mean them, they will want to make other things.

Where is the news about what we really want?

——­, when I took him to the train yesterday, spoke glowingly of the way the Standard Oil Trust had reduced oil from twenty-nine cents to eleven cents.

There was not time to say anything.  I just thought a minute of how they did it.

Why is it that people—­so many good people will speak of oil at eleven cents in this way, as if it were a kind of little kingdom of heaven?

I admit that eleven cents from twenty-nine cents leaves eighteen cents.

I do not deny that the Standard Oil Trust has saved me eighteen cents.  But what have they taken away out of my life and taken out of my sense of the world and of the way things go in it and out of my faith in human nature to toss me eighteen cents?

If I could have for myself and others the sense of the world that I had before, would I not to-day, day after day, over and over, gallon by gallon, be handing them their eighteen cents back?

What difference does it make to us if we are in a world where we can buy oil for eleven cents a gallon instead of twenty-nine, if we do not care whether we are alive or dead in it and do not expect anything from ourselves or expect anything of anybody else?  I submit it to your own common sense, Gentle Reader.  Is it any comfort to buy oil to light a room in which you do not want to sit, in which you would rather not see anything, in which you would rather not remember who you are, what you do, and what your business is like, and what you are afraid your business is going to be like?