Such angelic tones filled her voice, such angelic pity illumined her paling countenance, as she said these hard-sounding words, that that hell-on-earth appeared at once to be what it is, a hideous intrusion on a fair realm. And two men sprang to their feet, as if to smite the thing back to the under world, and deliver Cerberus from his chains. Ethel stood beside them, one with them in the purpose; saying, swiftly, with the flame of a white-light-spreading through the very pores of her fine face: “Hold to your present thought! And take home now the part of the story popularly forgotten: Pluto promised Cerberus, as a gift to whomsoever could release and bring him to the upper air _without the use of weapons_. “The promise holds good today. But—but among the Greeks there was a man—Hercules. He did it. “There are such men among Americans. Hercules did it. How? Certainly not by licensing Cerberus to remain chained down in Pluto’s regions. What Hercules did do, was this: he brought Cerberus a morsel fresh from the feast of the ‘gods of Olympus’; and Cerberus, at the taste, aflame for more, burst his chains, and willingly he went away with Hercules to the upper air, where such feasts awaited him. “Men of America, the trouble with our nation is, there is a dearth of deities at our Capitol! There is still a lack of Herculean power! We want more there at the moral-feasts of our Olympus, the flavor of which would be new to our desiring, fighting, frenzied Cerberi! It is not that our ‘masses’ are so greatly degraded. It is that our superiors are so little superior; are, in fact, so much at one quality with the chained Cerberi, that, for the gift of Cerberus, no man has yet been able to bring him to the upper air. Worse than that, faith is nearly gone, that there _is_ any upper air, or that there are at our Olympus any Capitolian gods.” “No. The smoke of hades and the ‘sop’ flung up by Pluto are there; and the snapping of the jaws of the Cerberi-congress, as they jump this way and that to catch ‘the sop.’ These things are there,” said Elkhorn. “Plus—some men who are to be honored,” said Paul Palmer. “Still, that is only partly the fashion of that place,” continued he; “the smoke of the torment still ascends. But the question there honestly today is, What is to be done about it? There is an upper air somewhere, and there are men in the Congress of the United States, and in the parliament of Britain, and in the legislative bodies among the peoples of every country in the world, who are seeking for these heights.” He halted, then looking out from under his deep brows, in intensity of upflaming hope, he said with ferocious directness: “Ethel Daksha, I ask you, what _can_ be kept restrainingly before the masses, if (according to your idea of liberty) we take away from them fear of punishment? If no man or woman is amenable to any other, will it not be grab, tear and carnage, by the hundred-headed-monster?”