I listened a year ago to a most unusual Fourth of July oration. The speaker, like most of us in this period of breakup following the Great War, was rather bewildered. He had, moreover, his private reasons for feeling that life was not easily construed. An illness, perhaps mortal, afflicted him. Existence had been unclouded until this last cloud came; why was it to end suddenly and without reason? He had gone through the Great War a follower of Mr. Wilson's, to see the world scoffing at the passionate faith it had professed a few months before and sneering at the leaders it had then exalted. He had echoing in his mind the fine war phrases, "Brotherhood of Man," "War to End War," "We must be just even to those to whom we do not wish to be just." Then some monstrous hand had turned the page and there was Harding, just as in his own life all success at the bar and in politics, and the joy of being lord of a vast country estate that had been patented in his family since colonial times, had suddenly come to an end; the page had turned. So this is what he said, in a voice that rose not much above a whisper, "I have told them where to dig a hole and put me, out here on my pleasant place. I don't know what it means. I don't believe it has any meaning. The only thing to do is to laugh. You have trouble laughing? Look about you and you will find plenty to laugh at. Look at your President and laugh. Look at your Supreme Court and laugh. Not one of them knows whether he is coming or going. Everything for the moment has lost its meaning for everyone. If you can't laugh at anything else, just think how many angels there are who are blank blanks and how many blank blanks there are who are angels ... and laugh." The Comic Spirit looking down from some cool distance sees something like what this lawyer saw. It sees President Harding and the Ku Klux Klan. The connection between President Harding and the Ku Klux Klan? The Comic Spirit, perceiving everything, perceives that too. For it Mr. Harding is but the pious manifestation of a sentiment of which the Ku Klux Klan is the unconscious and serviceable parody, that instinctive rush of a people with the world breaking up about it, to seek safety in the past. Men always shrink thus backward when facing an uncertain future, just as in moments of great peril they become children again, call "Mother!" and revert to early practices at her knee. It is one of the most intelligent things the human race ever does. It is looking before you leap: the race has no choice but to leap; it draws back to solid ground in the past for a better take-off into the future. Mr. Harding represents solid ground, McKinley and the blessed nineties, the days before men raised a presumptuous hand against the clock.