Humanity has indeed labored over a thousand years for these simpler things, ever since that crowd of uncultivated Dutchmen came down on Rome, and the feudal system adopted Christianity unto itself and strangled it, or sought to do so. We have tried with brain and sinew, through blood and fire, to get this boon, that our lives may be respected, and our liberty of person not constrained. And now, in the nineteenth century, we have got it; and lo! society is bored. Languid and dull--too dull to hear, in its liberal mass, that low and distant murmur, too skeptical, indifferent, to see the dark low cloud, just forming, now, to the West and East--is it a mighty swarm of locusts, or is it merely storm and rain? Here and there a tory sees it, dreading it; here and there a radical, dreaming of it; their imagination aiding both. And the multitude, who are not indifferent, and who are never bored, have little time to look at the weather, still less to read and think; or, if they read, it is no longer now the Bible, which, they are told, is but a feudal book, a handy tool of bishops and of premiers. Moreover, modern enlightenment teaches that it is a lie; there never were twelve basketfuls of fragments left from loaves and fishes on the Mountain; therefore what words were spoken on the Mountain cannot be true. The world is free; and ninety-nine per cent. are miserable, and the other one is bored. So, we remember, Flossie Gower was bored, when she got all her wishes, and had liberty to do what thing she chose. But surely, liberty being the greatest good, it follows she must choose to do good things? But to-day the light of the sun does not content us, nor the fragrance of the woods and fields, the breath of free air and the play of mind and body, love and friendship, and health and sympathy. These are but the tasteless water of life; the joys of possession and of envy are the wine. The early pagans were happy with these indeed, benighted creatures; but what though the ancient text says, What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Others will envy us the world; but our own souls pall with us. We moderns have invented _amour-propre_. What matters being happy? The true bliss is, that others think you so. We have realized equality; and all these good people (even to Jem Starbuck’s sister) struggle to escape from it. Jem Starbuck was a nihilist, and their logical counterpart. What did Flossie care for her two horses and Russian sleigh and silver mountings and black and white furs and waving scarlet plumes? If Central Park were the wastes about the Northern Pole, do you suppose she would care to take her sleigh-ride there, and show off to old John Franklin’s whitened bones alone? Is it the light, and the air, and the motion, that makes her pleasure; is it the mere child’s delight in brilliant colors that makes her flaunt her trailing scarlet plumes; or is it the subtile intoxication of the world’s notice